Blessed by the Potato

I don’t know what’s changed behind the scenes, but it looks like my domain host is no longer handling the URL forwarding for my site properly. It used to be that it would forward the holypotato.com part to [MY_IP]/blog which would allow you to add on the location of any particular post [ /?p=XXX ] to create a link for any particular page. It was a little annoying (couldn’t just cut and paste from the address bar), but it worked at least. Now though, things are all screwy and that’s not working. More importantly, my hidden/administrative subdomains [ xxx.holypotato.com ] that I used to direct me to certain parts of the site for admin stuff or my own personal file bank home-away-from-home are also taking me to the main page, which is bad. So far that’s annoying but not critical — reading, commenting, and as you can see, authoring are all still working fine. The RSS feeds (which oddly enough do use the same URL structure as trying to link to a specific page) appear to still work.

I’m working on seeing what I can do — bear with me, especially if the site goes dead for a little while while I fiddle.

Update: Ok, I know what’s changed behind the scenes. Domain Direct, part of TuCows, who used to be, way way back in the day in league with Rogers (or took over a registrar that was), where I bought the holypotato.com domain from originally, has been shut down and its operations taken over by Hover, another part of TuCows with substantially inferior service. Everyone on the support forums is complaining that the redirection to individual pages isn’t working. Just logging in to the support forums took 20 minutes. So it doesn’t look like there’s going to be an easy fix for this from them, which means it’s probably time to go host shopping again.

Update Jan 23/09: At first Hover tried to pass this off by saying that “page-level redirection” was a premium service that not many people wanted, and consolidating the Domain Direct and other registrars meant cutting some fat… but after a number of people complained about it, it appears to be mostly fixed (I’m still having an issue with the favicon, but I can live with that).

Well, if you haven’t noticed, a few months ago I put up some fairly discrete ads (one on the right sidebar, just under links, and a small banner just before the comment form if you go anywhere off the main page). Never did I allow myself to get deluded enough to think that these would ever pay much, especially given how little traffic this site gets, but I was hoping that it might be enough to cover the cost of webhosting (or at least the difference in cost between webhosting and sucking up electricity with my own server).

No such luck. Even though my traffic has nearly doubled thanks to my guest articles at the moneygardener, the results from the first three months of ads are in, and the grand total is: $0.03. That’s right, one cent a month. I’m thinking of taking them down as soon as I get off my lazy butt to find the stylesheets, because that’s pretty pointless. I got an email a few days ago (which is what made me think to check my balance) from Google’s adsense optimizer robot thing, and it recommended basically that I put up a whole ton more ads. Now, I don’t want to turn into MDJ, and have half the front page as solid ads just to make a few bucks a month, so I’m going to pretty much ignore the goobot.

One thing I’m going to look into is to try to blacklist a few of the advertisers that I know my savvy users just wouldn’t click on, to give the ads that have a better shot of being of interest show up. Also, I should note that I’m expressly forbidden from encouraging my readers to click on the ads, so just in case, you better not click on any for a few weeks after this post.

I’m closing in on both the 500 posts mark as well as the 3rd year of BbtP being in blog form. I was going to do a best-of post for my 500th post, but those can sometimes be pretty lame, and I’ve also got a small flood of new visitors after the Money Gardener put up a link today, so I figured I would instead do a best-of post now to try to guide newcomers to the good stuff.

About Blessed by the Potato:

It was revealed to me at a young age in a vision (induced by an overdose of caffeine and no sleep for 36 hours during a programming assignment — damn you Sze) that the the Potato was a great and powerful supernatural power, and that I must worship it and follow it’s teachings. I was blessed by the Potato that night, for my programming assignment got an A+ even though I don’t remember actually having my eyes open at all for the last third or so of it. Combined with the fact that there were a great many newbs taking my preferred handles at the time as the internet grew, I chose to use the name Potato, in honour of my new… whatever.

More to the point, Blessed by the Potato is the name of my sometimes-whimiscal, sometimes-serious personal blog. As a personal blog, it covers a wide variety of topics with no particular posting schedule — some weeks I’ll post every day, some weeks not at all, though it’s very rare for me to miss more than one week in a row. Hopefully this post will help you get started on the 3 years of material here, and find what might be of interest to you.

Personal Finance:

I’ve always had a passing interest in money and the stock market, and especially in the small numbers games, like figuring out how much you have to use the phone before a monthly plan becomes better than pay-as-you go. However, blogging about personal finance has only been a very recent thing for me. There are certainly more knowledgeable and experienced people out there writing about personal finance, but if you want verbosity then you’ve come to the right place.

Personal Finances
My Financial Mistake And What You Can Learn From It
Rent vs Buy
Mortgage Budget Sheet
Intro to Finance: Mutual Funds
Intro to Finance: Stock Market Investing
Intro to Finance: Leverage/Margin

Cars, Hybrids, and Saving Gas:

I’m not really much of a car guy or a gear-head, but I write about my car a bit, especially since it’s been stolen… twice. That got me looking at replacements, in particular hybrid cars, which I’ve written about in great detail. I’m also interested in them since they seem to converge on that space between techno-geekdom, environmentalism, and personal finance.

ScanGauge – Part 1 – A nifty device that among other things can give you real-time feedback of your car’s fuel use; can be used to help you train yourself to drive more efficiently.
Hybrid Cars: The Benefits of My Research — A long discussion of almost every aspect of hybrid cars; unfortunately it’s starting to get a little dated.
Hybrid Payback – Them’s Fightin’ Words! — People focus so much on the financial aspect of buying a hybrid, but even then they do it wrong! Here I take a very large number of words to say that you should look at how much you could save over the life of the car, and not how long the payback is. Plus, I point out that at worst you’re out the hybrid premium, but if gas prices keep rising you could save a lot of money, so a hybrid drivetrain is also like insurance in some respects!
Fear of Hybrids — Magnetic fields? Really?
Nokian WR Review — I’ve become a snow-tire believer. These are great because I don’t have to take them off in the summer!
Gas Mileage and Winter — A discussion of why gas mileage is worse in winter, and some tips.

The Environment, Conservation, and Other Green Sundry:

One of my first posts to draw in a random visitor from the Google was one on a malfunctioning security light that was eating up half of my house’s total electricity consumption, and how I read the meter on the side of my house to track down the problem.

Where The Heck is the Juice Going?
Snow Crash + Further Hydro Measurements

Insanity:

Insanity is all around us, and apropos to the heading, just about anything can be found here. In particular, after my car was stolen I commented a few times on stupid, insane thieves. Most of this stuff is more topical/timely though, so it might not be worth delving too much into the archives.

Power Bricks
Life With An Evil Genius

School and Science:

As the kids would say, I’m in 23rd grade (3rd year of my PhD). Science interests me enough to make a career out of it, however, I explicitly avoid trying to write too much about my own field: it’s not that interesting to other people, and I try to keep my professional life professional (and BbtP is anything but professional). That doesn’t stop me from writing about science in more general terms though.

Advice For My Sister As She Goes To University

Gaming:

I used to be an avid video game player. The last year or so I haven’t really found the time, and the Wii is just too much like exercise some days ;) While I do have some posts discussing and reviewing different games, I can’t really say there’s any I would highlight for new readers or include in my best of. Nonetheless, you know now that that category is there if you’re interested.

Food:

Food and eating is one of life’s great pleasures. However, I find it hard to write too much that’s meaningful about it. Note that I do have a recipe section in the “Pages” on the right.

Permalinks:

And finally, a short note about permalinks here. Unfortunately, I don’t have my hosting set up quite right to be able to simply cut and paste from the address bar — often a bit of URL massaging is needed. To do so, take the root (www.holypotato.com) and add the /?p=XXX where XXX is the number of the post in question (it’s the last part of the URL that you will see in your information bar by hovering over a link here).

Though I don’t write with a mind to what people might want to read and just write/rant about whatever happens to interest me at the time, I always kind of fancied having people read what I say. I know that I really only have about 3.5 readers (the half is the guy who keeps checking in every few weeks just to say “TLDR”), and suddenly I think that might be a good thing.

Right now I’m struggling, really struggling, to finish writing a paper. I like science, I like what I do (err… mostly), and I love the fact that I’m advancing knowledge, possibly standing on the forefront of a major revolution in medical care. Of course, all my work is really for naught if I can’t share it with the world, which is where the publishing process comes into play. Publishing my work and contributing to the body of knowledge of the human race is perhaps the coolest thing I will ever do, but I also find the whole idea patently terrifying. This is not a small or friendly audience I’m trying to address, and once the paper is out of my hands there’s very little I can do to affect changes if a mistake slips through. Just thinking about what potential reviewers might find to criticize locks my brain up in a kind of writer’s paralysis; stage fright of the written word. When I don’t really care what people think when they read my writing, when everything is at least psydoanonymous, and particularly when I can play it fast and loose with the references (how I hate referencing), I can hammer out prodigious word counts. Most of my blog posts go up almost as fast as I can type them out, often without any proof reading even — a few thousand words a night is not uncommon (this post was hammered out in like 20 minutes and has 373 words). When it’s for a serious publication, suddenly I lock up and my output drops to something like 50 words/day average. I just churn the keyboard, writing and re-writing and deleting and staring and thinking and worrying.

This blog is not popular. I think that might be a good thing, or else it might not exist at all.

First off, I haven’t updated WordPress…. ever, but my search isn’t working as well as I would like: it returns 10 hits on the first page, and then “previous entries” actually goes to the same place the “previous entries” link does on the main page, which is my previous 10 posts, rather than the next 10 search results. A few choice pages are indexed in Google, but not enough for me to be able to use Google to search my site. I was looking for my really old post on Rogers’ digital cable, and did find it with my 2nd try at search terms, but I still wonder if I should upgrade to WP2. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the escaping it did on apostrophes over at Netbug’s blog so I haven’t tried it yet, but his search string seems to work better. Oh, wait, I see now: I think something’s malformed in my search results stylesheet, because if I enter into the URL /?s=searchterm&paged=2 then it works beautifully, including the links to follow on to paged=1 and paged=2. Why that’s not there on the first results page is beyond me.

Anyhow, the reason I wanted to link to that post is that I got a call from Rogers today. They were telling me that 2009* is right around the corner, and luddites like me with basic analog cable were going to be forced to upgrade to digital cable then. Would I like to upgrade to basic digital for “only” $8 more per month? I pointed out that that was the regular price of digital cable. He said yes, but I would get all the benefits of digital including more channels and “digital clarity”, plus I could lock that price in and avoid any potential price increases in 2009. I pointed out that it was a pretty raw deal: I saw digital as a gain for Rogers and an annoyance for me, since I hate the extra boxes, so I wasn’t going to pay any extra for digital. Plus the price difference would have to double to make locking in for 1 year over 6 months in advance of the change make sense for me.

This got me thinking: I haven’t turned my TV on in over 2 months (ok, I’ve turned the tube on to play the PS2 or Wii, but I haven’t actually watched something on TV in that time). This is partly because I’ve been gone for almost a month of that time on conferences, and partly because it’s the summer so all the shows I watch are into reruns or on hiatus until the fall. However, I probably could go without TV entirely through the year… though that’s because I can download my few “must see” shows, and can pull Global, CTV, and CBC from the air for those rare times when I just want some noise, e.g.: when working out. Wayfare, however, doesn’t seem to like the ergonomics of watching shows on the computer, and it is a little tiresome to burn stuff to DVD on a weekly basis, and trying to stream video to the TV via the Wii’s wireless ethernet sounds like the devil’s work to me. But for $360/year, I wonder if her mind can be changed on that score…

I am really keen to try a digital antenna/converter (ATSC) and see what’s over the air in that format. London’s a bit far from the US broadcasters to pick much up on analog, but I might have some luck with digital. I heard that in Toronto, there’s better digital-over-the-air service than Rogers’ basic cable.

* – Note: Feb 2009 is the digital switch-over for over the air stations in the States, and I believe Rogers is going to attempt to change their cable network to digital only at the same time. Canadian over-the-air switchover isn’t until 2011. However, Rogers will only be allowed to force the switch if 85% of their customer base voluntarily goes for digital. The CBC reported in 2007 that, at their rate of growth at the time, yhey were about 4 years from reaching that figure. That tells me that the Rogers caller was full of shit.