Urban Puddle

I really enjoy free software. I love benefiting from it and I sleep easier knowing that no person or company is going to screw me out of money for an 'upgrade' or take away features under the same guise. Still, programmers have to make a living and the maintenance model of giving away the software and charging for support leaves me wondering what happens to a company/individual when too many people opt for the free option over the other. As a developer I cringe at the thought that my livelihood is dependent on donations or people clicking ads. It makes me wonder: can we charge for applications anymore in a world of free software?

I was pretty stunned today when I signed up for Online Banking at SunTrust to find out that their corporate version for small business wouldn't work with Firefox. This has been the case since at least 2005 when I last interacted with them so it's not a new problem. Message to SunTrust: There are more banks than web browsers. I am not changing to Windows and using IE just because you can't get your act together.

Using google ads has always seemed an easy way to go. Since I slapped a few ads on my site last year The Google has been steadily rewarding me from clicks that readers make. At its height, this blog would generate about $1 per day from around 1000 unique visitors. Today, I'm getting around 10 cents from 800 unique visitors. Weird, huh? The click through rate and types of ads are pretty much the same and there's not much competition in the online advertising arena (notice how those guys always get acquired so fast?) so from where I'm sitting (on my couch) it looks a little arbitrary. One day your blogging might be on pace to buy you dinner at a fancy restaurant and the next.. not so much. All this to say that I'm glad my livelihood doesn't depend on online advertising. Oh and also, beware The Google.

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I don't like to use this blog to toot my own horn, but I'm pretty proud that the technology* project I led** back in 1999 while at Apple (Airport) was just rated at #13 in the Top 100 Tech Innovations of all time. If I had a tenth of a penny for every 802.11b station out there.. well, I'd be paying somebody to type this for me. :op

Of course, ahead of 802.11b is ahead of a bunch of really cool techs and a few questionable ones so I'm not sure how much stock I hold in the actual Top 100. Still, it was fun to see!

Quick, you're running for President and need to show that you're still in touch with the real America. Where do you go for the photo-op? Well, it turns out that Clinton goes to Dairy Queen and Edwards goes to Wendy's. Is it just a sad statement that fast food restaurants have come to symbolize what our country is about? Click through for the entire Jon Stewart video and find out what Obama and Brownback did..

It's been a while since my last entry. Turns out Typo 4.1.1 (the software that powers this blog) has turned into quite a turtle lately. It takes forever to post an entry and even comments have started failing. I'm still undecided as to what to do, but I have a few ideas so don't go very far. To keep you interested, here's a free music download from Montreal's Stars called The Night Starts Here.

I got to chat with Luke Hoersten the other day about his fantastic music. Luke's a fell linux user and produces all his stuff using Open Source software and then releases it under the Creative Commons license. This is a guy that the community should totally be supporting. You can listen to the podcast here (iTunes link) and subscribe here.

Show Notes too!

Today I received a notification that I am eligible to take part in a class action lawsuit against some financial company I've never heard of. I'll let you all make a determination based on this factual information:

1. If successful, I get 3 months of 'service' free. Noting that it was probably a mutual fund I own that participated and not me, this is pretty irrelevant.
2. The plaintiff is eligible for damages up to $7500
3. The plaintiff's lawyer is eligible for fees up to $1,300,000

Ain't America grand? Well, I guess other places aren't so great either.

I decided to check out feedburner to see if this blog is at all useful to people on a daily basis. Here is the new feed for urbanpuddle. At the same time I want to mention that, while I still intend to post the music downloads here, I'll probably end up posting them more frequently over at Buyindie so if you're interested in the music, check out the Buyindie.net feed as well.

This weekend I finally got around to integrating basic Paypal e-commerce with Buyindie. At this stage I don't do enough in sales online to justify using Authorize.net or any comparable online credit card processing systems. But Paypal let's you buy with a credit card so hopefully nobody hates this. If you do, you can always send me a check and I'll post you a shirt. Email buyindie at gmail dot net if you're interested otherwise, just head over and buy a shirt online!