Okay, that’s a bit of a strange title. My apologies. This subject came up today during morning coffee, and it was pointed out that someone is drinking a very expensive ‘health drink’ to be generally healthy. I countered with a point of ‘not consuming a family size bag of Tostitos in a 24-hour period of time pretty much voids any health benefits from a ‘magic potion.’

I’m not any sort of health connoisseur, but I’ve read enough (and obtained via media osmosis) to understand that there’s no magic fix for being healthy. Especially when the underlying habit doesn’t change. This once again goes to show the mentality of ‘I can buy my way out of this…’ — the idea of the quick fix to a different problem. It’s like treating the symptoms, but not fixing the problem.

Anyway, enough of that. It’s not what I intended to write about (but made for a shockingly different title).

In other news, I installed a single update which Windows told me was ready to go tonight. One update. Granted, it ran in the background (installing), but it took forever to complete. It must’ve ran for five minutes! For the dumb malicious tool remover thing. This just seems ridiculous — is something that is apparently so unused (I’ve never used it — I wouldn’t even know where to find it to run it if I wanted) so tightly integrated into the operating system so as to require tremendous amounts of time to install?

My machine here at home is a 3.0GHz box with 1GB RAM. Not exactly low-end. It took forever to complete. I just don’t understand. Anyone with ideas is more than welcome to attempt to leave a comment (or let me know what the hell is going on).

I was looking through some server logs tonight and discovered that I’m getting some strange requests from the yahoo domain that point to my resume page. A lot of them (enough to get recognized as a relatively unique referral URL).

Off hand, it appears as though it’s coming from some sort of Yahoo antivirus checking system…but what’s strange is the question — why? There’s nothing unique about the resume page that I would think requires an AV check. It’s got another stylesheet than the other pages, but it’s not a PDF file or anything that I’d normally consider being a candidate for AV activity. Furthermore, it’s been from a series of different user agents and IP addresses. So I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, unless the page got linked from something else on the Yahoo network.

I don’t know. I’m full of questions tonight. I submitted another Good Question tonight for consideration. Just because I felt like it and it seems obvious.

I read yet another article today about the ad blocking thing. This time the writer sided more with the Firefox blocking fellow than anyone else I’ve read from. This reminded me of what I intended to write about related to the ad blocking bits (and I promise I’ll write no more about it after this) last week.

I don’t mind online advertising. I never really have. As long as it’s done well, it really doesn’t matter to me. In fact, there are some ads I actually like to see — they’re crafty, well-done, and are intuitive. There are also the incredibly unobtrusive advertisements (the Google ads come to mind). These all qualify as Good. Or as good as they get.

Then there are the Bad advertisements. You know the types — the intrusive, in-your-face ads that are either so gaudy it’s revolting or (heaven forbid) the ones that talk to you or don’t give you the default option of NO SOUND. These, as noted — not so good. Those and the ultimately stupid pop-up window ads.

My own personal opinion is that the smaller percentage of Bad ads really give the remaining ads an incredibly bad perception. The idea of all advertising now becomes intrusive. It’s ‘squeaky wheel’ syndrome. The fact that the squeaky wheel gets the oil in many ways applies to the bad ads. You don’t remember the (generally tastefully presented) ads — at least I don’t — but you’ll never forget the ad that randomly started speaking to you in the background of an un-focused tab (God, is that you?).

Advertising is a necessary evil. I’m not against it. As noted before, I think it’s ridiculous to block an entire subset of users based upon a theoretical installation and company ‘alliance’ if you will. But I also think that this wouldn’t be as big a deal if ads were all tastefully done.

Therein lies another problem, though. When ads seamlessly blend into the content, do they then not work as well? Gaudy ads get attention. Attention gives recognition and presumably results in some additional sales. So as someone in marketing (or in charge of marketing), I probably want to get [my product] some recognition. Which leads me back to ‘when does this go too far,’ which I believe is ultimately a personal variable.

But, I’m also the type that places value in good content. I’m more than willing to deal with ads when there’s good content behind them. That’s a legitimate model. But placing artificial (or completely made-up) value on content based upon the creator’s own personal emotions and then ‘blanket blocking’ users from even potentially viewing said important content is simply ridiculous.

So that’s my somewhat rambled late-night thoughts about that matter. Presumably for the last time now. So until next time…

“I would have made a good Pope.”
– Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)

–MZ