Jeremy Reimer's blog

The year was 1983. Shoulder pads, Transformers, and breakfast cereals were all the rage. While dreaming of at least two out of these three, I happened to view a TV commercial for the latter.

"Mom: Eat your cereal, Johnny!"

"Mmm! It stayed crunchy!"

The cereal in question was Post Honey Nut Crunch Raisin Bran, a peculiar combination of other cereal names that made it more of a mouthful to say than to eat. It was probably for this reason that Post abandoned the cereal less than a year later, after the initial round of commercials had long since drifted off the airwaves.

This presented a problem when my 11 year-old self tried to convince my family that this cereal actually existed.

The TV commercials were long gone, and back then nobody was archiving them in any format. The cereal boxes themselves were off the shelves, and may never have even made it to the shelves in my market. How on earth was I going to convince my mother and sister that such a crazily-named cereal actually existed? They thought I was just making it up to be silly and to fool them, and without any evidence on my side, it was hard to make the case that I wasn't.

Flash-forward 27 years later.

On a complete whim, I decided to try and search for this long-lost cereal on the Internet. YouTube hadn't archived any of the commercials. The breakfast cereal page on Wikipedia steadfastly denied that such a cereal existed. Just when I thought Google was about to fail me, I came across this:

It was an archived copy of a local newspaper, circa 1983, and an article written by Martin Sloan, a bored consumer beat reporter, about the existence of coupons for Post Honey Nut Crunch Raisin Bran. While the image was a scan of the newspaper, the textual contents were fully indexed, allowing me to jump directly to the relevant snippet. You can view it here yourself just by clicking this link:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=950&dat=19830831&id=dfILAAAAIBAJ&s...

If this doesn't blow your mind, think about more than just breakfast cereal for a moment.

If, as this odd case seems to confirm, Google is scanning and full-text indexing the contents of every newspaper ever written, the potential of this for information retrieval is incredible. While most newspaper stories are filler and nonsense (like my breakfast cereal coupon article), they remain the standard archive for daily human events for the last two hundred years.

Before, if you wanted to read something from an old newspaper, you had to trek to a library and hope that they had a copy archived on microfiche, then painstakingly search for the right issue and page. Searching was impossible. So all this knowledge just ended up stuck on tiny bits of film, hidden away from the reach of all but the most incredibly patient of researchers.

Google may piss me off with their AdSense and AdWords rackets, but the fact that they are engaging in this deep a level of information archiving makes it hard for me to do anything but love them. The human race can only be boosted by easy access to our entire history, not just for silly things like Honey Nut Crunch Raisin Bran, but for important things, and everything in between.

Maybe I should send them a Valentine.

The last thing I expected to find in my mail box was a letter from Google trying to win back my love.

Maybe it was just coincidence, but I found it interesting considering that just a few weeks I put up a blog post entitled Google Ads are useless and don’t work. Perhaps the semi-sentient, Skynet-like Google bot had noticed that I had complained about low Google AdSense revenues, run a quick check to confirm my low Google AdSense revenues, and then fired off this automatic card. It does feel a bit weird to receive a Valentine from a machine entity.

Nonetheless, here it is. Google is offering me a “free” $100 to spend on AdWords, so that I can advertise my own blog. Buried in the fine print is a little “gotcha” line about how unless I cancel, Google will continue to charge me long after the $100 is gone, a nice source of recurring revenue for them. It’s a great endless loop of cash for the search engine giant—I pay money to Google so that people will visit my blog, then I put AdSense ads on my blog page so that Google can charge other advertisers money for viewing them. Only in the unlikely event that someone actually clicks on a link do I get my fraction of a millionth of a penny in payback. Google, meanwhile, is laughing all the way to the bank.

Still, I wonder if it might be worth playing with my “free” $100 just to see how the other half lives. How much traffic could I drive to my site with a few AdWords? Perhaps I could forget about trying to get big numbers on for my blog and just advertise my novel, Edge of Infinity, directly. At least if people buy my book I get a measurable bit of cash, rather than millionths of billionths of a penny.

Maybe I’m just being a grumpy old curmudgeon. Google has been a great resource for me for years and has never charged me a penny for their services. Maybe I should give them a chance. Maybe Google really does love me.

On the other hand, maybe Black Mesa will help me out. That was a joke, ha ha, fat chance.

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!

Oelph on Ars Technica wrote this post the other day, entitled “I have to stop reading TechCrunch”:

I've been reading TechCrunch on and off for a little over a year now and finally come to the conclusion that I have to stop reading it.

I dislike Arrington. I dislike Scoble. More importantly I'm getting downright depressed seeing all these damn young kids in high powered jobs in Google or successful startups. All developing websites and apps which seem pretty pointless but still rake in tonnes of investment.

I used to think I knew technology. I'm only 32. But now I realise it passed me by long ago and I'm struggling to understand this new world.

This was my reply:

I think that much of the Scobles, Arringtons, Googles, and Social Web people are in a bit of an echo chamber, where everybody links to everybody else to tell themselves how awesome they are for being so awesome.

I'm older than you (37) and I sometimes feel the same resentment and disconnection, but I try not to let it get to me. Remember, you and I are posting to each other on a web-based forum, which is about as Social Web as it is possible to get. Yes, I like and use Twitter, and I blog, and I checked out Google Wave and all that, but I tend to come back to the Ars forums time and time again.

I'm trying to make a focus shift in my own life as well, from just consuming all the latest web content and buying the latest gadgets (been there, done that) to producing my own content, in whatever form I can. This is far more enjoyable and satisfying than just consuming. I'm betting, for example, that you enjoyed making this thread. It may be not much, but it's yours, and you created it. This is a neat feeling.

Basically, I don't think you are struggling to understand the "new world" at all. I think you've got it.

There are times on forums where you feel you are disconnected from everyone else, and don’t really get what they are talking about, or vice versa. Then there are times, like these, where you really share a moment. Ironically, it was a moment about not understanding other people’s moments, but still…

Ars Technica posted my plea for Amiga game developers this morning. By the time I got into work, this was the state of my inbox:

This is so awesome. My inbox now runneth over with people wanting to talk to me about what it was like in the world of Amiga game development. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this months ago!

Well, now at least I know what I’m doing for my Christmas break! I am so pumped for this!

Writer’s block can happen at any time. It can last for any length of time. Sometimes this can become a real problem.

Many years ago I decided to start researching and writing a book on the history of the Amiga computer. My initial announcement, full of piss and vingegar, was on comp.sys.amiga.advocacy. “I am writing the history of the Amiga,” I proclaimed, boldly writing the first two pages on my iBook G3, and then I promptly got stuck.

A few years later, I had an idea. I contacted the owners of Ars Technica and asked if they were willing to publish the story on their site, in weekly (or monthly) instalments. Suddenly I had the momentum back. I published five articles dealing with the history of the early Amiga company, the buyout from Commodore, the splashy release of the Amiga 1000 in 1985, and the struggles the company had to deal with with shortly thereafter.

I was on a roll. I had all the sources I needed and the writing just flowed. I got up to the point where, according to my outline, I was going to leave the chronological tale for a while and delve into some stories from various aspects of the Amiga community. The first aspect? Gaming, an important part of the Amiga experience.

My momentum slowed. I finally got one article out after playing through a whole slew of popular Amiga games, but I needed more. What I really needed were some great stories from people who were there, developers and artists and managers who worked on Amiga games back in the 1980s and 1990s.

I had a plan! I would find the names of old Amiga game developers and contact them! It was so simple, it just might work! Between the Internet and old game boxes, I found plenty of names. That’s where the problem started. Matching names from the 1980s to current email addresses in 2009 is virtually impossible. Some of these people had gone on to be much more influential in the industry, and were now hidden behind corporate “Executive Staff” pages. Others had disappeared from the Internet entirely. Still others had names that were too common, so that email searches went to the wrong people.

So I got stuck again. For more than a year.

In the end, it was desperation that got me out. I had agreed to a mid-to-late December deadline for resuming my Amiga history articles on Ars Technica, and this time, I thought, I would really try, harder than I had ever tried before. Surely this would work! Of course it didn’t, but as the deadline loomed I had another idea.

What if I, instead of the next article, posted a short plea on Ars Technica itself, asking for anyone who was involve in the Amiga games industry to contact me? If it was promoted enough, the article could flow through the series of tubes comprising the Internet, and maybe people might see it and email me, instead of the other way around! I proposed this idea and the Ars staff accepted.

The next time I get stuck, I’m going to try to skip to the desperation stage much, much sooner. Maybe it will even work.