Dave Kellam

Notice the ads on this site? Probably not. Advertising has been one of those things that has been hard to nail down properly on the web. What works for some won’t work for others. Not to mention the devious nature that 90% of the ads seem to have; punch the monkey, useless smilies, Windows errors. Most of it is crap.

Google style text-ads are everywhere. You see them arrayed haphazardly across many a templated weblog without too much thought and proceed to read about the webmasters that are disappointed by poor results. I’ve generally avoided slapping a bunch of ads all over this site because people aren’t going to click on them. At least not the regular readers — you’re just punishing them by displaying useless ads on your site. The people coming in via search engine are a different matter though. They’re transient, have little attachment to the site and are looking for something specific anyway. I don’t really mind showing them pseudo-random search-engine generated ads. And that’s what I’m doing.

Search Engines and WordPress

How do you go about doing something like this? For WordPress, I hacked together a plugin using Ryan Boren’s Search Hilite as a base. It’s kind of ugly, could be done better and I’m not going to support it. But I’ll make it available if you want a basic building block for your site — download.

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I haven’t posted much material related to Intelligent Design, mostly because the argument seems so stupid. It shouldn’t even be called an argument. This Esquire article (full text) was too good to pass up though. It focuses on Intelligent Design, but also touches on the broader dumbing down of America.

The Creation Museum ranks up there as one of my favourites from this whole debacle. This is a photo of one of their displays, featuring a giraffe and Adam naming a Sabertooth tiger. Nice kitty.

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This may be faulty logic, but follow me through. The Globe and Mail is supposed to be Canada’s high-brow, more intelligent newspaper, the New York Times of Canuckland if you will. As such, you will find me doing the challenge crossword on any given day of the week (like any good igloo-dwelling citizen). Now, we all know the Times invented the crossword, but they stay away from cryptics — it promotes a weird level of pomposity. For good cryptics, you want to turn to the New Yorker and Fraser Simpson (he authors the Saturday cryptic in the Globe).

So, what does all this newspaper name-dropping have to do with comics? Well, the Globe publishes a view comics next to their challenge cryptics. We can only assume that’s it’s some vain attempt at reproducing the cerebral air of the New Yorker’s strip. Long story short, the Backbench comic next to the cryptic wasn’t particularly funny until I made a few changes. See if you can spot them!

We have loads of new Seal Club action coming at you. First off, a quick redesign. Got rid of the old look in favour of a cleaner, whiter layout. The page is now entirely swathed in Garamondy goodness or some other serif font.

Now for the fresh meat. Two new interviews for 5Q: Naz Hamid of Absenter and Joen Asmussen of NoScope. They’re fairly short and won’t take too long to read. While we’re on the subject here’s a quick visual recap of the five interviews so far:

That is all.

The last month or so has been an interesting one for the site. I started the redesign about a month ago and it’s still going strong. This time around, it’s not just about looks, most of my efforts have been concerned with structure; thinking about how people visit the site and ways to keep them around. It’s not easy. If you’re really interested, read the change log. The site will never be finished but this layout should stabilize within the next few weeks, I still haven’t figured out how Michael is actually quantifying his progress.

Despite my best efforts at becoming a structural whore, eightface has managed to pop-up on the radar of a few CSS gallery sites — most notably, CSS Beauty, Design Shack and Fadtastic. So, hello to all the new visitors and thanks for the constructive comments and feedback. I’ve made a few changes a result, namely toning down the grunge on some of the headers.

A few people have mentioned their love/hate of the grunge stylings. I’m inclined to agree that a lot of the grunge and erasure sites popping up are a direct response to the austere 37 Signals school of design that we see so much of these days. And yes, it is a fad. One of those things that floats across the internet every few years. Usually in response to an outpouring of corporate work and people wanting to do different things with their personal sites. The vintage, worn look is very forgiving and has been one of my staples since the days of Photoshop 4 on the family P90.

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I needed something new for my desktop, was starting to get sick of the photo that was there. Of course the results are posted here for your pleasure.

The image links to the file on flickr. I also have two versions available here: 1024px and 1280px. Made use of the second brush set from the howiezine site, mostly for the arrows and dots. It took 3-7 hours depending on how you feel like counting time.

The NYTimes is running an article about life hackers. This quote sums it up perfectly, “Information is no longer a scarce resource – attention is”. A large portion of my HCI classes were spent discussing how to notify people without actually interrupting them (aka attentive user interfaces / more). It’ll end up being one of the larger problems facing the computer industry for at least the next 10 years.

We’ve reached a threshold in terms of information availabily and devices to interact with that information; be it iPods, cellphones, laptops, whatever. What we need are devices that work for us. A microwave is pretty convenient, but wouldn’t life be a lot easier if your frozen dinner had an embedded RFID chip that told the microwave exactly how to cook it? What about that punk kid on a skateboard listening to music? Should you hit him with your car, or have it send a message to his iPod? The ability to invade music devices probably isn’t that smart, but you get the idea.

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The time has come for me to write a book. Yes, you heard me correctly and no, it’s not crazy talk. The reason: Seth sent me an email about the NaNoWriMo challenge. I was going to dump it in the trash, but the brain started ticking away. Basically, it involves writing 50,000 words over the month of November. I remember Wes trying to do it a few years ago. It’s doable if you break it up in managable chunks.

I haven’t done too much on the creative writing side of things since my tenure at Golden Words ended a year and a half ago. So, there’s no point half-assing things with a few short stories, may as well dive right in.

There’s a large community aspect to the challenge (if you’re into the workshopping sort of thing). I probably won’t do too much of that, it’ll be hard enough for me to avoid distractions long enough to pump out a few thousand words every day.

This announcement is mostly to prevent me from jumping out of the frying pan before this shindig gets started. Now, I need to finish off some work that pays the bills. Stay tuned for further details.

Apparently, Nintendo is (or will be) running this commercial (4mb mov) for the Gameboy Micro here in Canada. It appears to be the work of QMG. The ad directs viewers towards Too Much Fun, but there’s only a place-holder page that redirects you to the main Nintendo page.

Some may say it’s a bit risque for Nintendo, but I’d just say it’s just something you’d usually see in another market (like parts of Europe). I was watching actual television over the Thanksgiving holiday, and found that Canadian commericals were becoming bearable for a change. There was a point not long ago, when most of them seemed like they were created by the drooling 3-year old nephew of an advertising exec.

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I’ve been taking a few photos with a Canon Eos Rebel G, on loan from my brother Pete (who’s headed to med-school in Bristol). I haven’t used film in awhile, but the lcd on my digitial camera is broken so I’m shooting blind either way. At least you get a lot of control with the SLR. The downside is the cost of developing, although they’re trying to remain competitve with digital and offering up photo cds with you prints. Anyway, here’s a funny shot from a black and white roll that I just received back from processing.

High winds from the tail-end of a hurricane brought down some trees around here last week. Apparently the car was a rental, I can just imagine how the phone-call with the agency must have gone. Also check out this photo of a man on a bike and some graffiti.