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Training future cassanovas

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

Last week, a coworker and I had dinner with three representatives from a potential vendor. One said he was planning to celebrate his one-year anniversary with his girlfriend in Paris and Italy. It was going to be a really good time, he promised, and he was excited about it.

My coworker and I, both married, looked at each other. We were about to deflate the air from his balloon, but we had to do it.

“Are you planning to propose to her there?” my coworker asked. Read more

I want to feel for this ad executive, but I can’t

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , ,

There’s a problem in this world, according to Mike Zaneis. It’s ad blockers.

On one level, I can relate to the guy. Ad blockers cost me between $500 and $1,000 a year, personally. But on another level, I have no sympathy for him. Because there’s so much problematic advertising out there. If you ever try to download something from one of the major download sites, good luck. There are 14 download buttons. 13 of them are ads that deliver something other than what you want, or ridealong stuff you don’t want. Somehow, Mike Zaneis thinks that’s OK, but blocking ads is wrong.

How about misleading ads that talk about government programs that don’t exist? I see an ad promising me a mortgage bailout every day. I’d love for Mike Zaneis to explain to me how this is ethical.

There are hundreds, if not dozens, of spammy news stories that are really just advertisements, preying on ignorant people, spreading misinformation and damaging society, littering the web today. Stop eating cumquats and lose 20 pounds! Buy gas at precisely 7:05 AM and gain 4 MPG! Here’s how Warren Buffet is preparing for the apocalypse! These things don’t work, and I haven’t figured out how these newsvertisements make anyone any money except perhaps through profiling, and I’d love for Mike Zaneis to explain this. There’s a guy named Kevin Trudeau who made a career of spreading this kind of stuff. He’s in prison now. The difference between Trudeau and this stuff is that Trudeau pitched it in late-night infomercials charging $19.95 rather than giving it away for free and turning the people who read it into the product–something Mike Zaneis denies anyone thinks is a problem.

But the worst of all are malvertisements–advertisements that plant malware on your machines. If I run computer code on someone’s computer who doesn’t belong to me, I’ll be hanging out with Kevin Trudeau in prison for the next 20 years. But for some reason, it’s ok to do this in the name of advertising. I’d love for Mike Zaneis to explain this, too.

But unlike Mike Zaneis, I’m not complaining. It might be nice to be a professional blogger, but I’m better off with my day job than I would ever be as a pro blogger. It’s nice when I make a little money off this web site, but a lot of what I write is to support that day job–I can find what I need at a later date very quickly if it’s on the blog. That content never makes me a dime. I have some niche content that makes virtually all of the revenue I see, but I’m hesitant to elaborate much further lest someone like Mike Zaneis launch a site and steal all that traffic.

But that’s the thing. I adapt. I have to do that in everything I do. I can whine about how I don’t make the kind of revenue I made in 2005, but the fact is, if I were willing to change a few things, I probably could make more now than I did in 2005. About 5% of what I write accounts for all of my revenue. If I could devote 20% of my content to those subjects, I’m sure I would make considerably more. Since that would require me spending four times as much time thinking about and doing different things from what I do now, I haven’t made that shift. But if I ever needed to, I could.

Mike Zaneis thinks people who create and use ad blockers are out to extort him. They aren’t. They’re trying to encourage certain limits on acceptable behavior. That’s one reason I’m careful about the kinds of ads I let run on this site. There are certain categories–profitable categories–that I don’t allow, such as ads for gambling sites, political ads, prescription drugs, and get-rich-quick schemes. Some of those categories were profitable for me before I discovered my account was using them, but taking money from those behaviors would be wrong, so I stopped doing it. There was nothing illegal about those ads, but there was nothing ethical about them either. So I draw the line there, because some things are much more important than money.

Mike Zaneis draws the line at a different place, and he’s trying to start a war. I’m not convinced it’s a war he can win, and I have no reason to root for him.

I am not in jail.

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , ,

The bank vice president apologized for calling the police on me.

That’s neither the beginning nor the end of the story, but it seems to me that police involvement of any kind is a sign that your real estate deal isn’t going as well as it could.

It all began with a Citibank loan officer named Aaron who promised me a smooth closing. In my view, being questioned by a uniformed police officer has no place in a smooth closing. And that wasn’t even the worst part of it, which troubles me.  Read more

Why tech encourages bad managers–and hope for those who want to be good managers

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

A friend asked me recently to talk to his son, a talented software developer whose career recently took a (temporary) turn for the worse, and he asked me a very good question.

Are there more bad managers in technology than good ones?

I said I think there are. And I told him why. But I’ve also worked for some very good managers, and I know exactly what it is that sets them apart. Read more

Spritz promises to revolutionize speed reading

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

I found a reference this week to Spritz, a promising smartphone/tablet app to help people read faster. Much faster. I tried the demo of the technology and could almost keep up with its 500 word-per-minute pace right away.

Now, I’ve always been a fairly fast reader, though I’ve never felt any need to have someone time my speed. I just know I read faster than most of my classmates did. But I know I don’t normally read anywhere near 500 words per minute. My typical blog posts are usually about 750 words, so that would be reading one of my posts in a minute and a half.

I’m interested in it, though, because I’ve resolved to read more this year. You can roughly estimate 100 pages at 25,000 words, so at 500 words per minute you could read a 200-page book in about an hour and 40 minutes.

I’m not sure I would want to rush through something really dense and technical at that rate–especially not something like the CISSP Common Body of Knowledge–but when the other choice is not reading at all, it’s obviously much better than that. And nothing says you have to pick one way of reading or the other. You can read a book quickly and come back and read the tougher parts more slowly. Some people say you shouldn’t read without taking notes; but running a book through Spritz is a fast way to find out if a book is worth sitting down and reading with a pad of paper–or, ahem, laptop with a word processor–next to it.

Details of how it will work are a bit sparse. Hopefully the app will be able to read your existing e-book library. If it exists as a walled garden where you have to buy books within the Spritz app, that seems like it would limit its usefulness to me. We’ll see. This is definitely a technology I want to track.

What am I giving up for Lent?

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

A longtime reader noted that many years ago, I wrote about giving up something for Lent. He expressed interest in the practice, and asked what I’m giving up this time around.

To be honest, I haven’t given up anything specific for Lent for a very long time. I’m cognizant of  the season, and I’m still a practicing Christian, but I have two minds about giving up something for Lent. It serves as a reminder of Christ’s sacrifice, yes. But the tradition of using up everything you’re giving up on the Tuesday before has become rather corrupted, especially in St. Louis. Basically it’s turned into an excuse for people who have no interest in observing Lent to throw a really wild, sometimes destructive, four-day party. That, to me, is unfortunate.

I guess the other reason I don’t give up anything specific for Lent is because I gave up something for all time. Read more

Getting past your own biases

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , ,

I read Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive last week. I always figured it was an autobiography or memoir, not a business book. But it’s a business book.  A very good one.

I avoided it because I didn’t like Andy Grove. I’ve never been a fan of Intel’s business practices during the 1990s and 2000s, including using payola to keep competitors’ chips out of large computer systems, but after reading this book, I’m more disappointed than anything. Whichever company had Andy Grove wins, period. No need to cheat. Read more

Let’s talk about net neutrality

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , ,

The battles are raging over net neutrality again. Conservatives generally are against it; liberals are generally for it. I think the battle is more over misunderstanding than anything else, so I want to try to clear up that misunderstanding.

Net neutrality is in no way, shape, or form related to the political slant of the data in transit. It is not the Internet equivalent of The Fairness Doctrine, the old law that forced television and radio programmers to alternate left- and right-wing content, or equal time, which forces programmers to give equal time allotments to political candidates from both major parties. It’s completely unrelated to both of those things.

What net neutrality is really about is double-billing. Read more

What to say to a coworker who was laid off

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

We had a round of layoffs at work last week. I’ve seen way too many of those. I’ve been one of the layoffs in too many of those, but not this time. If you’re wondering what to say to a coworker who was laid off, read on. Unfortunately I have experience in this area.

It was painful to watch. There were lots of tears, lots of glassy eyes, some denial, some apathy, and even a bit of acceptance. One day, someone walked around to every affected cubicle and wrote “You belong here” on the whiteboard. You can look at it like a sign of solidarity or like some kind of crazy reverse passover, depending on whether you were one of the affected.

I’ve made an effort to seek out the affected people I knew. It seemed like my duty. Read more

Three months with Viglink

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , ,

Last fall, Amazon abruptly ended its affiliate program in Missouri, and they didn’t pay any of their pending affiliate fees either, which was a nice touch. I wasn’t getting rich off affiliate links by any stretch of the imagination, but it at least covered the expenses of running the blog. I looked for replacements, and settled on Viglink. Viglink is nice because it honors all of your existing Amazon affiliate links. It pays at a lower rate, but at least the old links still work. And if Viglink finds the same product at a different affiliate that pays a better rate, it will convert the link for you.

Another advantage in my case is that Viglink will monetize links to a lot of brick and mortar retailers. So if I mention something that one of the big-box home improvement stores sell, I can link it. People can click on it, see what it is, go buy it that day, support their local economy, and I make a penny or two. It’s not much, but when you’re the lone page on the web explaining how to do a handful of things–which I am in a few cases–those pennies can stack up. And I was making $0 off them up until October.

A final nicety over a lot of other affiliate programs is that the payout amount is pretty low. Amazon didn’t pay anything until you made $10, and Google doesn’t pay anything until you make $100. Disclosing earnings is probably against Viglink’s terms of service, but my first payment wouldn’t have made Amazon’s minimum.

It’s a slow start, but once Viglink has seen your most popular pages with links that it can monetize, it picks up. Three months in, Viglink is probably accumulating 50-67% of what Amazon would have made.

The amounts are lower because Viglink signs up for the affiliate programs, I provide the content, and we split the revenue. But the upside to that is that Viglink lets me participate in affiliate programs I never was eligible for before because I didn’t meet the minimum requirements for traffic volume, or that I simply didn’t know about. So that gap could theoretically close.