Author: Aaron Weber

Comical Mishap

I am in Barcelona, at Brainshare. Somewhat to my surprise, my Spanish hasn’t totally disappeared, and I’m having a lovely time being everyone’s translator. I even manage to understand the people who ask questions in Portuguese, as long as they talk very, very, slowly.

However, this morning, I tried to get out of bed and my legs were asleep, and I fell over, and hit my face on the edge of a table, bruising it badly. Combined with Sunday’s shaving mishap, this now makes two days out of three that I’ve been at the show looking like I’ve just come out of a rather nasty fight.

Also I read “Willful Creatures” by Aimee Bender. Excellent.

Housing deals abound

See, you can find some good deals if you’re just willing to look hard enough, maybe consider something further out of town. But if you’re willing to commute, hey, you could get a place described as having only one bad room! And I’m not too sure what they mean by “glory hole,” either– possibly the bedroom comes equipped with a means for poring boiling oil over your neighbors?

Impeach George Bush

Notes from a refugee from New Orleans:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the
foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing
their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various
directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched
forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there
was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank
was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not
crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

Content is King

Maybe content is king, and maybe it is merely a courtier. But whatever it is, everyone will tell you it should be done right, which means doing it their way.

One of the people giving advice is Gerry McGovern, who will tell you that the key metric of content quality is sales generation per page. That’s how we know that J. K. Rowling is a good writer: the books sell, therefore they are good! To maximize the quality of your website, according to Gerry, you need to focus on the pages that have the broadest audience, and delete the unpopular filler pages surrounding them.

His Harry Potter example is really an odd choice given that those books tend to be about 20-50% too long, populated largely by rehash and filler. You could tell “The Half-Blood Prince” in half the pagecount, save years of writing and pounds of shipping, and still charge thirty bucks for the hardcover. In contrast, the article can’t be made much shorter. Don’t get me wrong: it’s 600 words, 590 of which are unnecessary, but if you cut it below 500, you don’t get paid for it, so you need to keep that filler in there. Even in Harry Potter, the filler serves a crucial function: it keeps the kids quiet for several additional hours. Each page is another few minutes of silence that parents will pay dearly for.

In other words, you may not like filler, but the good bits depend on it like a jewel needs a setting.

Important Realizations

I already knew this country was being run by shitbirds, but this weekend I did learn something much closer to home. I found out why my cats didn’t like the catnip I had grown for them: it has tomatoes growing out of it. My cats are no more nippy than they were, but on the plus side, I will soon have some cherry tomatoes.

This afternoon I am doing tech-review on an introductory computer textbook. One of the pictures illustrates the word processing concept of “fonts” by showing Comic Sans. My comment for this section is going to be “you should not use Comic Sans. Ever.” If I can stop young students from abusing fonts, I have in some small way made the world a better place. Even if I can’t tell a catnip sprout from a tomato seedling.