Category: Uncategorized

My problem with organized religion is illustrated by a small slice of a speech being given by some dude with an accent on the TV in Utah right now. He used an urban legend as if it were truth to prove a doctrinal point. Religions are based on legends formed from half-truths and inaccurate memories accepted as fact and given a veneer of respectability by the passage of time.

The specific legend he referenced is the “Nasa Space Pen” legend, in an attempt to recommend that people simplify their lives: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp . The “simple” solution of using a pencil results in sharp pi…eces of conductive graphite floating around the cabin getting into astronaut eyes, nose, ears, as well as the spacecraft’s electrical circuitry. Additionally, a pencil is very flammable in a 100% oxygen atmosphere which is a profound safety hazard… which is the reason astronauts today don’t use them.

Meanwhile, the “space pen” — research paid for by a capitalist company, not the government — is safe, effective, non-flammable, and a near-perfect solution to the problem of writing in space. But it is a very complicated writing instrument, used for its safety and versatility over the hazardous but “simple” pencil. And one in use by all astronauts everywhere because it does the job without a safety hazard.

I understand the desire to encourage people to simplify their lives. I agree with the sentiment. But using falsehoods to prove a point poisons the well of one’s entire store of wisdom.

So, unless you’ve been hiding under a facebooky rock, you know that my film (in that I wrote, directed, cut, scored, and financed it) NINJAS VS ZOMBIES is finally out on DVD. Yup.. you can get it on Netflix, buy it from walmart.com or bestbuy.com (or a host of other places – just go to www.nvzmovie.com and click the DVD), you can watch it on demand with AMAZON VOD (if you have TiVO I think that is part of the deal), you can see trailers on youtube, read reviews at aintitcool, order our comic book, and basically bathe in NVZ goodness all over the intertubes.

And please do.. cuz it really helps me a lot, even if you just put it in your queue. That being said.. what a ride. We are currently in post production on the sequel “NINJAS VS VAMPIRES”, which is taking a crazy long time. Its a better, more complex film.. but it is WAY harder to make. We’ve been shooting since May, and ar eabout to go into reshoots in 10 days. (Thats all the time I have to get my sh*t together and get a rough cut assembled). Combine that with the publicity I’m doing on NvZ, and basically I never stop. Its kind of killing me (Although shares in wine and fast food are coincidentally up).

I don’t mean to complain. Its an amazing ride.. one that I am really proud of.. but its nearly time for a break. The worst of it is the “business part” – I used to laugh at the “I love the show – hate the business” line. What a load of crap, right? No.. its true.. the distribution stuff is murder. Contract negotiations and occasional shadiness – but also some really cool, honest folks there too. (Our Rep is really down to earth, despite having real Hollywood “ins” – her husband is a main character on a well known TV show).

There are stories I can’t tell, wish I could (will one day) – but meantime, clear your Halloween weekend for Ninjas Vs Vampires (probably in Leesburg.. BE THERE) – and grab NvZ on DVD. And drink one for me.. cuz I will likely be having two.

Friends of the netherweb,

I’m looking for tried-and-true processes for enabling a new potential tech vendor access to my website without providing access at the web server level.

In the past, whenever getting first acquainted with a potential vendor, the need always arises for the potential vendor to actually look at the website before committing to a price or workload schedule. Also, a vendor is interested in seeing the site to ensure that they are familiar with the current systems and that their skill set is capable of executing the work.

Historically, I’ve given the vendor ‘root command’ access to the webserver. Once they’ve gone in and grabbed what they needed I’ve changed the primary password. Finally, when the vendor and I agree on terms and I feel comfortable with that particular vendor, I give them the new password. This is kind of silly on multiple levels.

Thus, I’m looking for process suggestions for how to get the website, in its entirety, to a potential vendor’s possession without opening up the full mothership treasure chest at the webserver host level.

Gracias Muchas.

So it turns out that the worst environmental disaster in US history — the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent spill — may be, in part, due to Microsoft Windows systems crashing. Now, I’m not going to straight-up blame Windows for this. Traditionally, BSODs (Blue Screens Of Death) are caused by malfunctioning drivers more than a malfunctioning operating system. But at the same time, to learn that the entire fleet routinely disables these Windows systems due to false-positive alerts and crashes is very, very concerning. Since when is Windows the preferred platform for mission-critical, life-saving, and possibly avoiding-the-extermination-of-all-humanity purposes?

Maybe I’m just being hyperbolic here, but give that massive methane explosions have repeatedly killed almost all life on earth before, just because it’s a 1-in-55-million chance I wish the engineers writing the software for the failsafe alarms had done a more thorough job.

Humanity killed by bad programming practices.

That would be a bad day.

Recently, a friend approached me with a short question that has a much longer answer.

“Do you think it’s really worth it to upgrade to the i3 Core processor?”

The computing industry has really stabilized over the past 5-6 years. We (collectively, humanity-wide) have bumped up against some really hard-limits in computing recently with heat management and silicon manufacturing techniques, resulting in the push to parallelize processing more: more cores, lower clock speeds, bigger caches, extracting more per clock cycle with less waste, reducing heat output and power requirements, etc. It’s been a boon for data centers, as the average cost of running these things has actually flattened out. Power requirements, while not going down, are not going up exponentially just like CPU speeds were for a while. And the power cost per GHz of CPU speed, and per GB of storage, is of course going down as we squeeze more performance per kilowatt-hour out of the systems.

So really, over the past four years, that has been the #1 improvement in CPU tech: extracting more performance for the same amount of power. Not extracting more performance as an absolute measure. Also there’s been a push to integrate Graphics Processing Units into the CPU core to enhance performance. As a result, it’s brought 3D gaming capabilities into the mainstream of computing, with lots of applications in real life that most of us rarely explored before. In addition, virtualization of operating systems has taken off like never before, as we can stuff more and more CPUs into the same form factor with similar power requirements. Even desktop users are very commonly virtualizing entire operating systems on their laptops these days. I know I do; I’m running a Solaris VM and a Linux VM on my Windows laptop at this very moment.

For the home user, though, if faster integrated graphics and extracting more work per clock cycle with better battery life tickles your fancy, then yes, an upgrade to a Core i3 (mobile), Core i5 (Desktop Mainstream), or Core i7 (high-end computing) processor is on your radar. Also, niche markets like audio-visual recording and real-time processing can take advantage of this sort of parallelized-power, if you will, driving innovation in the computing industry today. If power consumption isn’t much of a concern and you prefer discrete graphics, or if you aren’t running applications that can take advantage of symmetric multi-processing, then the i3 may not be worth the upgrade for you.

Keep smiling!

–Matt B.

Chanced across an article guaranteed to create some controversy: Women who are carrying more body fat have worse memory than those who carry less.

I received an invitation today (July 12, 2010) from Web Hosting Hub to try out their hosting service and compare it to my current web hosting provider (who shall remain nameless). There are a number of key features that I look for. Note that this list is from memory, and I didn’t check their list of features before writing it.

My Non-Negotiable Requirements:

• Very reasonable monthly rates (less than $10 per month, or $120 per year)
• Effectively unlimited bandwidth. I use a LOT of bandwidth every month between my MP3s and video files, upward of several dozen gigabytes a day. I used to bump up against bandwidth limits all the time with one former provider. I’m not hosting pornography or objectionable content, just LOTS of files and backups of configurations and files that I’ve archived but might need again.
• Effectively unlimited storage. With the 20GB or so of data on my site, I’ll want to know I never run out of room to store things now and in the future.
• Responsive 24/7 technical support via chat, email, and phone. When my site is down, or if I run into an issue, I want to know my webhosting company is aware of it pronto!
• MySQL support. I want this either on the server I’m using, or else hosted on a high-speed network.
• *nix-based hosting. My stuff works best on Linux or UNIX… not on Microsoft Windows.
• Shell access. This is critical for me. I don’t want just plain-old FTP… I want an actual shell, where I can chown/chmod files in my hosting directory, run scripts, and be able to manipulate files without having to download and upload them constantly. Cron alone won’t do; I’ve been a UNIX admin for fifteen years and want my shell!
• Support for Drupal, which requires the normal LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python.
• Satisfaction guarantee. I want to know I can easily get my money back if it doesn’t work out for some reason.

As you can see, I’m quite a picky user. I know my tools, I know what works best for me with my experience and mastery of the technology. And I know if a vendor is trying to shine me on. To help me in this comparison, WebHostingHub.com provides a handy table to compare their features against their competitors.

What Do You Want?

Now, obviously I know exactly what I want out of a hosting provider. If you’re new at this game, though, WHH provides a number of guides to help you make your decision:

How to choose a webhosting provider is an overview of things those of us in the industry a long time know to look for. Company longevity, space and bandwidth, customer service, and reliability are all really important to look at. If you’ve outgrown your Blogger account or want more flexibility, configurability, and tools for your web site, you should read this to help you figure out what you’re looking for. Of course, WHH scores high on the marks in its own evaluation, but it’s still a good read.

Is Dedicated Hosting The Solution For You? is useful to help you evalute if you really need all the power dedicated hosting provides. Because dedicated hosting is so resource-inefficient, it’s much more expensive than shared hosting, but offers you almost unlimited configurability. I’ve been down that route before, and while it’s nice having the power at your fingertips, even for me — a bona-fide power-user — it was more than what I needed and I eventually went to a shared-hosting provider principally due to the price of dedicated hosting.

Should You Consider Windows Web Hosting? covers that age-old question: Linux or Windows? This is a No-B.S. evaluation of the benefits and risks of both. It all boils down to your application, as usual, and despite Web Hosting Hub being a mostly Linux shop, they give Windows a fair shake here.

Let’s dive in!

Now to figure out whether they’re going to meet my needs as outlined above, and have reasonable prices, to boot. I stepped through their signup pages. Right on the front page, I found they hit some of my non-negotiable requirements:

• UNLIMITED Disk Space & Bandwidth — a good sign!
• UNLIMITED Websites — Well, kind of expected in this day and age, but positive.
• FREE Domain Name — Cool, that was a feature of my current hosting provider that I’d forgotten about. I don’t need it right now — I already have a domain I want to put on this, waywardsun.org — but good to know.
• 24/7 U.S. Technical Support — OK, another “yay” point. Like most Americans, I want my tech support to be competent in English.
• Control Panel — OK, cool if you’re not me, gets a big “whatever”, but hopefully it has some good tools.
• FREE premium Web Builder — Meh.
• 90-Day FULL Money Back Guarantee — I might be taking advantage of that just for the purpose of this review!

I clicked through to the “See All Features” link. And there it was: Drupal support, Blogging Tools, PHP5, Python, Perl, cron jobs… OK. This looks like a pretty standard UNIX hosting place now. Good, good sign. I kept going, though I didn’t see “shell access” anywhere on the list.

Well, my usual next step is “Is there a coupon?” I know, that probably sounds weird, but one of the first things I look for is some sort of discount available for the first time period after signup. With my current provider, it was the first year for $20, subsequent years for $120 per year. Which is about what I expect. How does WebHostingHub stack up? Well, after some Googling for “WebHostingHub coupons”, I found several affiliate deals that purpoted to offer a discount, but in fact were trying to redirect your search to competing service providers. Unable to find any further discounts, I decided to choose the standard $4.95 a month deal using their regular signup.

I found an error that caused me some concern at the first signup page, though. There was a grammatical error. It reads “All account include a FREE domain registration or transfer!” As you probably know, “accounts” should be plural. This is a fairly common mistake among non-native writers, though. It got me thinking: where is this place hosted? The first thing I checked was the IP address: 173.205.127.11. Running this through ARIN, the American Registry of Internet Numbers, I found they were a US-hosted company working under the InMotion Hosting netblock. OK, so they are in the US and it looks legit, based in Wyoming.

Color By Numbers

One thing I like to do is look up the Netcraft stats on various providers to figure out what they’re running. Here’s Netcraft’s page on WHH.

Here’s what their page looked like back in 2002, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

What does this tell me? First, that they’ve been around for at least eight years doing the same business: providing low-cost shared hosting.

Chatting Up The Sales Guy

I paged one of their sales engineers from their web site on chat to see how well that worked. Within just a few seconds after submitting the form with my question, a chat box popped up, and I had a sales engineer on the line ready to answer my questions.

Matthew P. Barnson: I’m evaluating your service and have some questions: Do you offer ssh shell access to accounts? What operating systems do you use? Do you offer any month-to-month plans, or only yearly plans?

You are now speaking with Brian of Sales.

Brian: Hello Matthew.

Matthew P. Barnson: Hi, Brian. Nice to meet you!

Brian: We do not offer SSH as our account is shared hosting.

Brian: s

Brian: We bill in 12, 24, and 36 month increments. 12 months is $83.40 at a $6.95 per month price point, 24 months is $142.80 at a $5.95 per month price point and 36 months is $172.80 at a $4.95 per month price point.

Matthew P. Barnson: And what operating system are you running under the hood on the shared accounts?

Brian: We run CentOS a Red Hat Enterprise on our servers.

Matthew P. Barnson: Thanks, Brian. You’ve been very helpful. I appreciate you taking a few minutes to answer my questions. Have a good night!

Brian: My pleasure.

When you are ready to get signed up it is much faster to order over the phone with us as all online orders are held up to 30 minutes for verification and also we do call to confirm any order received through our website prior to activating the account. Please feel free to give me a call at 1-877-595-4482, or 757-416-6627 for international customers then option 9, then extension 878. We can have you setup in 5 minutes and I can also address anymore questions you may have. Or if easier you can contact me through chat by simply putting my name into the question line of the chat.

Now, it’s important to be aware of the rates. You get the special introductory rate only for your initial signup. This is pretty typical of the webhosting industry, but it’s worth your time to check out the terms of service.

The Devil Is In The Details

Web Hosting Hub’s terms of service are pretty standard. No pr0n, no spam, shared hosting means be a good citizen and not hogging the CPU or memory. I found nothing out of the ordinary. But it’s really important that you be fully aware of what it is you’re buying, and what a “FULL Money-Back Guarantee” actually means:

1. You agree to subscribe annually for $107.40 per year after the expiration of your initial promotional term. That puts them right at pretty much the exact same price as my current webhosting provider. Credit where credit is due: the company is very up-front about this recurring cost, and they encourage you to sign up for three years so that your price is locked-in at a very low rate for that term.
2. There are a number of services to which the 90-day money back guarantee does not apply. I understand why this is, but if you’re a newbie it’s really important to be aware of it. This includes SSL certificates, Free Domain Names ($11.95 per name), Dedicated IP address fees, and a few more things. If you sign up for the extras on your account, you’re going to be docked for those if you cancel before 90 days.
3. You’ll get a pro-rated refund of your remaining hosting fees if you cancel after the ninety days. If you were scared of the three-year commitment to lock your price in at $4.95 a month, don’t be. The refund policy is right in the Terms of Service in black-and-white. A pro-rated refund is a sign of a top-notch webhosting company that isn’t afraid of the competition.
4. If you sign up online, they are going to call you to confirm you are who you say you are before they allow you to sign up. In my opinion, this is a positive thing: it’s a sign of a reputable business wanting to make sure they are doing business with a real, live person on the other end.

CONCLUSION

If you’re looking for a web hosting provider with very decent fees, a solid Internet connection , unlimited transfers, and a plethora of tools to help you set up your site for a minimal time investment, WebHostingHub.com may be the exact match you’re looking for. They’re very competitive with other services, and offer a discount on 3-year paid-in-advance service that’s really hard to beat. They are also clearly offering an ethical service, are based in the USA, and don’t appear to have any hidden terms to surprise you.

On the other hand, if you already have a web provider with many of these features who meets or beats the price — or if you are a hard-core geek like me who feels he absolutely needs shell access with any hosting provider — you may want to look elsewhere. In the end, the lack of shell access was the deal-killer for me… but if you don’t even know what a shell is, or if you can live without one, WebHostingHub is definitely worth checking out.

You know, I realized that, after over a decade of operation, I have never really written an “About Me” page on my web site. No time like the present!

I was born in 1973 in the state of West Virginia, United States of America, as “Matthew Patrick Murphy”. At the tender age of three months, my mother left her alcoholic, abusive husband and moved the family to Washington, D.C., then to Alabama for the next several years. After meeting and marrying Bill Barnson while he attended the USA Air Command and Staff College — who later adopted me, thus I became Matthew Patrick Barnson — we all moved back to Washington, D.C. for my new Dad to work at Andrews Air Force Base. We built a house in a swamp on the shores of Piscataway Creek, near the Potomac River, a few miles from Fort Washington. I used to bicycle to Old Fort Washington and loved exploring the fort and the cannons there.

This is where I get my Military and Aviation interest. I love airplanes and things that go “BOOM”!

A few years after moving to southern Maryland, a couple of our neighbors were gunned down in a love triangle murder. That was kind of the last straw for my family, so we up and moved to a better neighborhood sixty miles north in Montgomery County, to a suburb of a suburb called “North Potomac”. Really, it was South Gaithersburg, but who’s counting? Anyway, the cost of the home was high, we were pretty house-poor, and I spent much of my teenage years living in the unfinished basement of our home, enjoying the cool during the summer months but hating the leaky walls during the winter.

Thus some of my Home Improvement and Lifestyle focus. I never want to live that way again.

Around the age of twelve, I discovered the world of FIDONet and LINDA, a local bulletin-board system, on my mother’s “Phillips Portable PC”. I eagerly exchanged messages far and wide under the pseudonym of “Haarough Drochenbalm”, pretending that I was over eighteen and that my nickname was “Harry”. Truth is, if I would have had my way back then, I’d have renamed myself to Harry. I loved the interaction. For a nerdy kid who really got stressed out socializing with others, the tiny green screen and modem was a solace where I was accepted for who I pretended to be, rather than the chubby pre-teen I was.

Thus my interest in Technology, Computer Networking, and primitive “blogging”.

As a teenager, I learned that I needed some sort of “in” to have some hope of getting a girlfriend.

Some guys played sports. I got winded walking from the refrigerator to the couch. Not going to happen.

Some guys were into Drama. After the first proposition from a gay guy, I decided I was only going to do that drama casually. I mean, I have no problem with gays. In fact, I’d have no problem being gay myself if it wasn’t for the fact that guys don’t turn me on and girls do. Sorry, fellas, you don’t know what you’re missing, and you’re never going to. But it seemed at the time that being gay was a prerequisite to being a good actor — or maybe the other way around — so I demurred.

Other guys played musical instruments. After watching Kenny Kramp and Marco Lorenzana play a duet on the piano in eighth grade when the band teacher was out of the room, while all the girls clustered around them, and all the guys huddled around in the back of the room staring enviously, I was hooked. I practiced piano for eight hours a day that summer, and kept up a rigorous practice schedule into my late teenage years. I was in several bands, starting with “Wayward Sun” in Jon Brusco’s garage during the summer of 1984. The very first song we wrote was “Fred The Cat”, a duet for poorly-played electric guitar and bass. The other choice for the band’s name was “Satin Knights”. Garage bands rule and still are the cutting edge of both lameness and innovation.

I still play occasionally, and have produced a number of singles and albums over the years, with a video game soundtrack thrown in for good measure.

Thus my interest in Music.

I decided as an adult that I needed to get in shape. I detail that saga elsewhere. If you want to change your shape to something more appealing, lift heavy weights at least once a week, eat plenty of protein — at least one gram per your lean body weight in pounds per day — in whatever form you prefer, carefully track your calories, and reduce either your fats or carbohydrates or both until you are achieving the weight reduction you want. Adjust from there to suit your body composition tastes. Every successful diet plan that retains muscle mass follows that pattern in one form or another.

Thus my interest in Health & Fitness.

My mother decided to cuckold her husband Bill and eventually forced him out of the house in order to marry one of her affair partners. I never got over this betrayal, not just of the man she married and taught me to love, but of her children and everything she claimed to stand for. I despised the man she married, even while being force to get along with him for nineteen years. As a result of this experience, I made it my life’s mission to be the best husband and father that I can be, and try to have and model healthier grown-up relationships than my parents did.

I am devoted to my wife and children. I feel that a healthy, successful marriage is my most important life’s work. My children will value my ongoing marriage to their Mom more than anything else I can give them, so when the time comes to choose anything else vs. my wife & children, they will win. Every. Single. Time.

Thus my interest in Relationships and Marriage.

Since the age of twenty-nine I’ve felt strongly part of my personal mission in life is to find out the truth and be open about it wherever and whenever I can. I abandoned the faith of my childhood — Mormonism — to follow the road less traveled. I currently consider myself a secular humanist — “little H” — but am open to whatever moniker you like that recognizes that I’m not your typical white Anglo-Saxon Protestant blogger (WASP). I’m your typical White Anglo-Saxon ATHEIST Blogger Itinerant, so if you want to refer to my faith, call me a piece of WASABI. Or anything but late for dinner.

Thus my interest in philosophy & religion.

Lately I’ve become interested in making money from web development technology. I’m really adept at this tech stuff and have worked with web technology on the server-side for a living for the past fifteen years. I’d like to try my hand at making money directly rather than just earning a paycheck from an employer who earns lots of money from my efforts.

Thus my interest in finance and entrepeneurship.

Oh, and finally, a lot of people have tried to tell me I need to focus my blog more on one specific topic in order for it to be successful. Sorry, I’m a Renaissance Man. I don’t believe in doing one thing well, or even being a Jack-Of-All-Trades and doing a mediocre job at everything. I believe in doing everything I put my mind to as well as I possibly can, and if that doesn’t fit with some advertiser or blogger’s view of the Way Things Ought To Be, then they can screw off.

DISCLAIMER

Oh, yeah. We need a DISCLAIMER here. You see, starting in July of 2010, I became interested in finding out how much people would pay me for my loquacity. So from time to time, you’ll find a PAID BLOG ENTRY. Now, the intelligent reader will see through these entries as the paid-shill advertisements they are. They will be few and far between — unless they actually make gonzo amounts of money, in which case they’ll be every single workday! — and you’ll see clear links back to this page in the text of the page. In fact, I may even anchor-link this part of the text so it takes you right here to this very paragraph.

You’re also going to find lots of instructions on how to do questionable things here. Look, you’re probably pretty smart and you can figure out that I’m not responsible for your choice to hack your boss’s email system, buy a product from a questionable manufacturer with ties to organized crime in Nigeria, or blow yourself up with a bomb made out of Diet Coke and Mentos. If you act on ANYTHING in this blog, please research it thoroughly before doing so, and recognize that it’s not my fault if you screw up your own life. It’s all you, bud. In fact, the one constant in all of your failures in life is YOURSELF. Think about it.

Recently, I’ve been conducting a great deal of research on blogging. Trying to understand what currently drives the blogosphere. After a great deal of “research” — said research being mostly “reading random links from bloggers who stay current” — I’ve come to the conclusion that, by and large, most bloggers are still doing what they’ve always done. Journaling their personal life, sometimes with hope of compensation, but more often than not simply so they have a place to express themselves, and more importantly, receive feedback that they are normal.

This morning I chanced across Pretty in Pink. I surfed through a number of recent posts to find something that interested me. Her blog details the usual day-to-day events and goings-on in her life, liberally mixed with product reviews and the paid endorsements and advertising links that are so common today. While perusing her recent entries, though, I happened across Pink’s recent post on post on Domestic Violence that stood out to me. Excerpt:

I began to think if being a battered wife is also normal? is it? does that mean once you commit your self to the man legally, it also gives him the right to punch you as often as he likes, does that mean too that once your married it also follows of submitting your human rights to the one person you think who loves you completely. If that is the case, then eventually married life will turn out to be hell and i pity those women who becomes helpless because of the bind between them.

This struck a chord within me. My mother lived in an abusive relationship with her husband for a number of years before leaving him when I was still an infant. It’s appalling to me how common domestic abuse is. And worst of all, how commonly the victims accept such abuse as a normal part of life, rather than being the aberration and correctable behavior that it is.

A number of months ago, as many regular readers know, I had some personal crises in my life that led me to deeply investigate what it really is that drives the connection between a husband and wife in a marriage. I found the works of Dr. Willard Harley, and reading his books and articles really turned my attitude around on marriage. Dr. Harley isolates the cause of abuse:

Abusive behavior usually begins when a couple tries to resolve a conflict the wrong way. Instead of finding a solution that meets the conditions of the Policy of Joint Agreement (never do anything without an enthusiastic agreement between you and your spouse), an effort is made by one spouse to force a solution on the other. Resistance to the proposal is matched by increasing force until the spouse browbeats the other into submission. Every fight is an example of abuse because it uses the tactic of emotional or physical force to resolve a conflict instead of respect and thoughtfulness.

There appears to be, in my opinion, a clear link between emotional abuse, physical abuse, and alcohol. Now, many people enjoy a beer now and then. But when the alcohol use slides into alcohol abuse, inhibitions are reduced. The natural instinct to attempt to force your way with others rears its ugly head under the influence of alcohol:

My Policy of Joint Agreement helps create a rule that identifies a drinking problem for what it really is. The policy says, Never do anything without an enthusiastic agreement between you and your spouse. That means if you are not enthusiastic about your spouse drinking alcoholic beverage, he should not drink even a teaspoon of it. If your spouse feels that you are being unreasonable, that he really doesn’t have a problem with alcohol, and then he goes ahead and drinks anyway, he is announcing that alcohol is more important to him than your feelings. He is willing to see you suffer, just so he can have a taste of liquor. If that’s the case, he is either incredibly thoughtless or addicted to alcohol, or both…

Is enduring physical and emotional abuse supposed to make us happy? I always thought it made us unhappy…if either spouse tries to sacrifice their own feelings so that the other spouse gets his or her way, the marriage is sure to suffer. Without mutually thoughtful decisions, marriage is usually a nightmare.

I have witnessed many recoveries from alcohol addiction, where the wife thought that once her husband stopped drinking, their marital problems would be over. But it wasn’t just alcohol that ruined their marriage — it was the way they made decisions, the use of alcohol being only one example. They needed to come to grips with alcohol addiction, but even more importantly, they needed to create a thoughtful way to make all decisions, not just the ones having to do with alcohol.

Thanks, Katy, for reminding me of what’s really important in my marriage: the feelings of my wife must always be paramount in my mind. Abuse, however, cannot and should not be tolerated or enabled in any way. This is surely something that has shaped me as an adult: I cannot, and will not, ever let myself become the abusive drunkard my father was.

“Whatever hatred saves the number.”

This nonsense sentence has a meaning behind it. As many of you have probably guessed, I’m working on posting more content to my web site. Part of my reason for this, at heart, is an experiment with this hypothesis:

A reasonably-intelligent person can make enough money from blogging to support a somewhat-expensive hobby, and possibly much more.

My expensive hobby is radio-controlled aircraft. I totally have self-interest at stake here. Monetizing my blog combines two things I love: writing and getting paid! One of the things I want to explore — and long-time Barnsonians, I apologize in advance for how crass this is going to sound — is paid reviews. Have someone send me a product, do a review of it, and get paid per word.

But see, what the advertisers don’t know is that I don’t gloss over JACK. I tell it like it is. I don’t care if the product was free or not. If it sucks, I’ll say so. If it’s great, I may just fall in love with it and overlook its faults.

So here goes. I’m signing up on a bunch of review sites with a cost of $0.01 per word. We’ll see if anything comes of this. The phrase quoted at the top of this entry was, in fact, a requirement to sign up at one of said review sites. Wonder what other hoops I’ll have to jump through?

UPDATE: Wow. Fun.

So, OK, I spent a lot of time signing up at the various sites that do these kinds of campaigns. In most cases, they need to “personally review” your site to determine a few things:

1. Has your blog existed for more than just a few months? This seems to be really important. If it’s a brand-new blog, you’re probably automatically rejected. 2. Have you posted more than a handful of times? Based on the nearly 2,000 articles here posted over a seven-year period, I think I qualify, but you never know. 3. Is your blog your own and not some kind of community network? Now, here, I worry a little bit. There are a few higher-privilege members of barnson.org that are allowed to post here, too. I don’t know if it will rule me out — most haven’t posted in a very long time — but the possibility exists. 4. Do you have a high PageRank on Google? I don’t know how high mine is. I really have never cared. I probably should pay closer attention; apparently, PageRank is important to marketers to determine if your blog is worth investing in. 5. Is most of your posting unpaid? Given that I’ve never been paid one thin dime for posting over 1800 blogs here, I think I qualify, but it’s still another interesting requirement. You can’t just post a bunch of reviews. You have to have a bunch of other original content, too.

Now, other than this, the ad networks seem to vary. Some want long product reviews, others want short blurbs as part of campaigns. Some want you to tag your posts as “sponsored”, others want you to astroturf with aplomb. Interesting game. I feel slightly scummy for playing it!