ReNe: web ads rant

Ever got onto those commercial websites with advertisements? Many websites now have them. At first I didn't mind because they meant I could read that site for free. When the advertisements were still banner or sidebar ads, they were all right. They were like newspaper ads, colorful boxes at the top or sides of the articles, and I could ignore them. Once in a rare while, they were even useful.

Then they became pop-ups and that was irritating. Pop-ups can spawn like the tribbles from Star Trek. They were so irritating they spawned a demand for pop-up blockers. Luckily any decent browser these days should have a pop-up blocker.

And then came the floating ads, which appear the first time you go to the page and 'float' over the page for anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds. Not only they obscure your view of the page, they may also block mouse input and if you get impatient and click your mouse to try to disable the ad, you often end up clicking on the ad and going to the advertiser's page instead. Highly, highly frustrating, since you have to do even more work and waste more time 'chasing' the window to close it. Floating ads claim to have a higher click-through rate than ordinary ads but I suspect most of the clicks are simply erroneous clicks.

The unicast ads, oddly enough, don't annoy me as much. Probably because the websites I tend to visit don't have these. Though they are huge and sometimes you end up wondering how the hell to close it without clicking on the wrong part and landing up in the advertiser's website.

The one that irritates me the most are the pull-down ads, and especially those that combine floating and pull-down ads. These are the ones that expands automatically when the page loads or when you mouse over, but some have a tendency to expand whenever the page moves, it seems. For example, when I'm reading an article that's longer than one browser length and I scroll down; the ads float and follow you as you scroll, and then expand. You have to waste energy maneuvering your mouse around those ads. It's like tip-toeing around an unwanted visitor in your own house.

I know the more elaborate ads pay a lot more (see the little table below), and some ads are fine, but there is a limit. I have actually closed sites that irritated me with their ads without bothering to read the content, and I feed articles from sites I frequent to google reader, partly so I won't see those ads.

Side note: Apparently studies have shown that people can be trained to get used to irritating ads; case in point: television ads. Even complaints about pop-ups have dropped over time.

I've not watched TV regularly for 14 years (internet downloads are a great invention) and I've not read paper newspapers for almost as long (because the 'Staid Times' don't have much to say). I even avoid the radio (again, music can be obtained over the net in so many other ways). So when I do encounter advertisements on my favorite media, I get highly annoyed. Happily though, unlike other media, there exists ways around irritating ads.

Out of curiosity, I googled around for typical web ads rates, for non-targeted ads (targeted ads pay more, of course), prices in USD.
banner ads: 50 cents or so per 1000 (page) impressions
sidebar ads: $1.00 to $1.50 per 1000 impressions
pop-ups: 4-10xmore than a banner ad, which is from $2 to $5 per 1000 impressions
floating ads: from $3 to $30 per 1000 impressions
unicast ads: $30 per 1000 impressions

ReNe: gen x

A recent conversation topic chain over lunch one day went along the lines of, "internet generation", which led to other 'generations' including "Gen X", which led to "what you listened to if you were Gen X", which led to "Nirvana", which reminded me of "Queen".

Don't ask.

So somehow, I ended up idly surfing youtube for 'Queen's songs' (how ever did we manage before instant-gratification-net?), and yeah, wow, I'm once again hugely impressed by Freddie Mercury's sheer talent. Some people have issues with his sexuality but hey, he's a singer, not your boyfriend. Does it matter?

On another note, talking about generations -- I feel a little old. I use the internet a lot, I work with it, am practically addicted to it, but I'm not from the so-called 'internet generation', or 'Gen Z', who grew up with the internet. I'm not even from the 'Gen Y', but am at the tail end of 'Gen X'; i.e. since my time, two more generations have been defined. Trouble is, bandying words like 'generations' around makes me think of a typical demographic generation, and if TWO other generations after me have been defined...

ReNe: new batt!

So my MBP has been giving me some weird problems, and it's not even a year old.

I used to have a problem with static discharge last year but it's ok now. Not quite sure what I did though, because I did a few things around the same time. I changed from using a UK three-pin + adaptor arrangement to a two-pin; also upgraded and then re-installed Leopard (when upgrading alone gave problems); and I also moved from a drier place (St Louis) to one with higher humidity (Toronto).

My battery was also dying. The 'health' and the amount of full charge it can hold has been steadily dropping; less than a year after I bought the MBP, battery health was 33%. Full charge capacity should be 5000 mAh and my battery only had 1833; Mike's was 4599. Turned out that the problem was with a bad batch of batteries. Happily enough, it turned out Apple was doing a free exchange of these faulty batch of batteries and I got a new one today.

Now to hopefully fix the odd problems with my sleep/hibernate mode...

ReNe: is google making us stupid?

I came across this article today -- the gist is the Google (and the internet) is making us lose our ability to concentrate. Though this is not the first time I've heard of this (that our use of the internet is affecting the way we think), I found myself identifying strongly with this paragraph (whose title I stole for this post):

"Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic

I've written about this before. As a kid, I could easily read a book from cover to cover without stopping. Now I still read a lot, but I find myself flitting from article to article. On the computer, it's all too easy to switch between work window to browser, and my browser typically has over ten tabs open. Because pages are linked, I'd leave the page open so as not to lose the links, and because the page remains open and because leaving open tabs to articles does not take up physical space the way leaving open books and papers do, I don't feel the urgency in finishing an article and closing the tab.

I do think that our heavy use of the computer and internet has significantly affected the way we think, at least for me.

The combination of powerful search facilities with the Web's facilitation of associative linking is what is eroding Carr's powers of concentration. It implicitly assigns an ever-decreasing priority to the ability to remember things in favor of the ability to search efficiently.

John Naughton, The Observer (Wed 2 July 2008)

So, the next question is, is that bad? Probably; this lack of concentration would spill over to many other areas in life, and a lack of concentration isn't a positive trait.

Is it that bad? That's harder to say. It seems like we're trading off one skill-set for another. As students, we're told cliches such as "it's better to understand than to memorize" and that "schools should teach children to how to learn". So, maybe we're losing our ability to focus, but on the other hand, our generation is more exposed to a much broader field of knowledge and we're (probably, hopefully) more savvy at looking up things we don't know.

Does it necessarily have to be a trade-off? Now that we're more aware of it, I suppose not. Already many people are talking about changing habits such as checking email every x minutes. It's not as if we have to completely stop using Google or the internet.

ReNe: attention span of a fly

I've noticed that the older I get, the shorter my attention span becomes. Shouldn't it be the reverse?

When I was a child, I could spend all day reading a book, cover to cover. When that book was done, I'd move on to another book. I'd build a Lego house and I won't stop until I had completed the house. Life was simple and I did not have many things to do. I had great focus, laser-like focus.

Now, I'd read half an article, think about something else, check a website on that something else, and that will link me up to three other articles. I have the attention span of a mayfly; there for 42 seconds and then it's dead. I blame it on tabbed browsing. I also blame it on being an adult.

As an adult, I now have a lot more things to do, many more responsibilities, one of which is myself. When I was a kid, someone would ensure that I get fed; now I have to work to earn money for my food, then I have to buy my food, prepare my food, clean up... and the cycle repeats, often even before I have time to clear the dishes. At any one time, I'll have multiple demands for my attention: fun stuff on my computer, a new anime episode I just downloaded, an article I have to write, three other articles to finish reading, a blog to update, emails to friends I should write, a hugely disorganized photo folder to organize, an e-book to finish, a paperback to finish as well, dishes to do, toenails to clip, bills to file away... Oh look, it's 3am in the morning, I've to sleep as well.

But it's not all that bad. As an adult, I have a lot more freedom and autonomy now. I can do anything that catches my fancy and (often) be able to buy the equipment that facilitates that fancy. This means I've more fancys now, each all grabbing for my increasingly limited attention. So I guess, in a roundabout way, it's not so bad that I now have the focus of a gnat.

ReNe: it's tough to be a green cyborg

Although the internet seems as airy as a butterfly when it comes to environmental footprints, there's actually a lot of hidden cost behind computers.

First, there is the environment cost in the manufacture of a PC, which apparently requires ten times the weight of the product in chemical and fossil fuels, and uses heavy toxic metals such as lead, arsenic, antimony, cadmium, chromium, and so on.

Next, if we look at the running costs (electricity costs) alone, it's can be quite staggering.

According to surveys conducted by the market research firm IDC, between 2000 and 2005, the power consumption of network computers doubled worldwide.
--snip--
Depending on the initial data, one Google search consumes enough electricity to run an 11-watt, energy-saving lightbulb for 15 minutes to an hour. [news article]

However, on the flip side, there are also a lot of environmental savings that could be had with computers. For example, online newspapers, magazines, articles, movies, music -- moving these from physical objects to digital data is environmentally friendly. I haven't subscribed to newspapers in almost ten years, and now that I read more news than before and from all over, if I had to buy each paper I read, I'd be very much poorer. I haven't bought a CD in years, and in the past year, I've only bought one book; many books can now be found online. No more bulky photo albums and envelopes of negatives that would degrade in years. Although I don't watch TV, I'm sure you can watch TV with your computer, thus saving one more appliance. At work, one can theoretically save a lot of paper by keeping all the bookkeeping digital, using powerpoint instead of transparencies, using emails instead of paper notices, etc.

I would like to be more environmentally friendly but I'm not going to turn all pastoral. Like I've said before, I'm a cyborg and I need my computer and internet. Ah, hard choices. I'd continue to use my computer but I'd pay more attention to reducing electricity wastage.

Some ways to reduce the power draw of the PCs if you have leave them on all the time (though not all apply to laptops):

• Configure the hard drives to sleep on inactivity.
• Do the same for the monitor. In fact, don't use an active screensaver, aka CPU-eaters. Have it blank out.
  
• In fact, switch your monitor to a LCD. A LCD typically draws less than half the power of a CRT.
• Configure your system preferences to run on energy-saving modes.
  
• Disconnect peripherals that are not in use, e.g. portable hard drives, CD-ROMS.
• Shut down when not in use. This is very hard for me; my computer's up-time tend to be measured in weeks, though it does go to sleep.
  
• Don't use a high-end video card. Unless you really must. After the CPU, the video card is by far the biggest power consumer in a typical PC.
• Upgrade to a more efficient power supply. (I didn't know this until I was googling around for tips.) Apparently, a certain percentage of the input power to your PC is lost as waste during the conversion from wall power to something the PC can use. At typical power loads (~90w), the average power supply efficiency is a disappointing 65%. So check your power supply efficiency.
  

ReNe: what if there was no internet?

Reading about stuff like peak oil and global warming and other possibly apocalyptic events... not terribly scary. So what's really terrifying?

The other day, a colleague idly asked, "What would you do if there was no internet?"

"Die," I said, only half-jokingly.

Seriously. When I think about how central the computer and the internet is to my life, it's mind-boggling. I'm logged on at least 7 hours a day at work, and at least another 4 hours at home. That probably qualifies as 'addicted' by some thresholds. For example, a study defines internet addicts as those who spend over 11 hours A WEEK on the internet.

What stone-age are they living in?? Eleven hours a week? I can easily spend 11 hours a day, many days in a row, on the internet. And I'm paid to do so for at least seven of those hours. Looking closely, the study was published in the... May 1998 issue of Professional Psychology. No wonder, I thought, and rolled my eyes.

We're all cyborgs. When we take into account the aspects of our lives that are dependent, not only on the internet but on artificial support systems in general, we are all cyborgs. Sci-fi writers such as Arthur C. Clarke often envisioned a space travel-centric future, fifty years ago, but I think the future will be much, much closer to that imagined by Ghost in the Shell.

And since we are all cyborgs, it is possible we would probably drop dead, or at least wander around aimlessly and drool like zombies, if there was no internet.

Southpark did a brilliant episode on this issue, and simultaneously slipping in the issue of peak oil, titled 'Overlogging'.