Blog Master G

Wow. This is very cool. The ad for my blog is now live. A Google search for blog now shows an ad for my blog as the second ad in the right-hand column.

I’ve captured the page as it looks tonight for when it’s not around anymore (or I decide my little experiment is over).

For the record, my visual counter currently reads 602 and my Nedstat counter reads 733.

I’m in the middle of creating my Google AdWords ad for my blog (while watching the timeless Clueless with Jen and my Mom) and came across what seems to be the only other ad for a personal blog: a search for the word weblog results in a top-placed ad for Ming’s Metalogue.

Apparently I’m not the first to think of this after all…

I have an idea.

I’m doing a lot of research today on Google, everyone’s favorite search engine, and the company where I would like to work some day. I’ve been reading lately about the company’s AdWords service and I just had an idea while reading the Compare Programs page. The brilliance of the AdWords service is that (A) an advertiser determines how much he is willing to pay, and (B) he is only charged for click-throughs to his site.

My idea is this: To understand how the AdWords program works and to see it in action, I am going to purchase an ad for my personal blog (yes, this one). I just did a search for the word blog and personal blog to see if anyone else has had this idea. As of today, no one else has. That’s the other part of my idea: Will people click on an ad for a personal blog? I’m not selling anything and my blog is mainly about my private life, so will people actually be interested? I’m interested to find out. What kind of traffic spike will I get? What kind of feedback, if any, will I get from people out there?

We’ll find out.

Yesterday’s trip to up north to Santa Rosa’s Safari West was a great success. Everyone had a really good time walking around the grounds before and after dinner, and enjoyed the unique occasion that was Thanksgiving this year.

After battling some traffic up 101, we eventually arrived in two carloads at the wild animal preserve. Dad, Mom, Peter, Jen, and I all immediately felt good about the place and our decision to celebrate turkey day there. Before settling in for the grub, we strolled around and met a couple giraffes, some sleek cheetahs, lemurs, macaws who only said “ba-bye,” gazelles, some porcupines, and more. And the food was delicious, too. I ate just enough and didn’t stuff myself too much.

Upon returning home for some games of Scrabble (at which I actually beat Dad!) and Apples to Apples, the rest of the night was pretty chill, with more gratuitous violence in Grand Theft Auto Vice City.

Lately I’ve been jumping around a handful of other blogs, including some of the most popular ones on the Web like InstaPundit and Dave Winer, who claims to have the oldest and longest-running blog on the Internet (since 1994). Today InstaPundit links to an article in the NY Times about what seems to be the mostly-men world of blogging.

Looking at some of these bigger blogs and the other blogs they link to makes me think that I should begin to hop aboard the blog train and start getting in touch with these folks to exchange links. Of course, my blog is mostly about my life and occasionally about the world, and the most popular blogs seem to be mostly about the latter. I doubt that many people are interested in what I do on a daily basis. But we’ll see. Maybe I’ll start to get a bit more proactive about getting people to link to this blog.

Mom just arrived from Sacramento, so now we’re all waiting for Dad to show up, before heading up to Santa Rosa for our Thanksgiving Safari.

Grand Theft Auto Vice City should not be legal. But I love it.

Yesterday my brother Peter arrived in town — I spent most of the morning waiting for him at the airport — and shortly thereafter our friend Mark, whom we’ve known for 17 years (hard to believe) since our parents were divorced and our Dad moved back to Marin, arrived with PlayStation 2 and bagfull of games. Mark was one of our early video game compadres, and last night we were reminiscing the old days when games were simple with titles like Soccer. Those were the days of the original Nintendo (released in 1985, the same year our parents were divorced). None of this fancy and way-too-realistic kill ’em all games of today.

Last night wasn’t the first I’d seen a game like Vice City. I had played Grand Theft Auto III, the game’s predecessor, at least once before when Tim brought his PS2 over to our place on TI way back when. But it never ceases to amaze me how fucked up and realistic this game is.

After we entered in a weapons cheat, I watched my brother control the game’s main character as he approached an innocent person on the street with a chainsaw and proceed to hack the person to pieces — with blood spouting everywhere. With realistic detail, he continued to drill into the person on the sidewalk after he had fallen. Later, I watched Mark play the game as he went on a special mission for a Haitian woman to snipe a gang of Cubans who had an ongoing turf war with the Haitian woman’s children. Eventually, we succeeded in the mission. And, of course, there’s the staple of the game — the ability to highjack anyone who drives by, steal the car (or truck or motorcycle or ambulance or police car or helicopter or tank), and proceed to drive around knocking over anything in your path, including people.

In the context of the game, all of this is absolutely hilarious. But then, I’m a mentally, emotionally, and psychologically stable 25-year-old who understands the difference between make-believe and reality. Not everyone does. And kids should certainly not be exposed to such realistic violence. Now I’m not saying that video games are responsible for violence in America, school shootings, etc. My point is simply that it’s pretty damn insane how realistic and fucked up games today are — especially when compared with games of 15 and 20 years ago. And that young kids should be closely monitored by their parents and not allowed to play such intensely violent games.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Continuing in its tradition of sports domination, my high school alma mater football team won in overtime Saturday, pushing its record to 10-0 in round 1 of the Sac-Joaquin Section Division I playoffs. Way to go, Marauders!

Jesuit fans apparently demonstrated quite the sportsmanship, too, giving Grant a standing ovation after its loss. That’s quite the contrast to the Grant fans, who yelled expletives at their coach and players for having attempted to go for the win, instead of the tie.

(Thanks, Dad, for these links.)

I like most movies. Jen sometimes makes fun of me for liking bad movies. Classic examples include Clueless and the elusive Fuzz Bucket, a made-for-TV ’80s movie that most people know nothing about (it was not even listed in IMDB the last time Jen and I checked!).

So whenever we see a movie that even I don’t like, you know it’s got to be bad. Such was the case last night when Jen and I headed to the AMC Kabuki in Japantown for a preview screening of Solaris, the new Steven Soderbergh film starring George Clooney and his naked ass.

Aside from the concept of a faraway place that causes beings to materialize from our memories and interact with us, and the general trippy nature of the film — both things I find pretty cool — there’s not much to write home about in this movie. It’s sort of like Eyes Wide Shut meets The Abyss and 2001: A Space Odyssey — slow talkers with very little character development hanging out in space with a big purple mass of looming energy. And, as Jen pointed out, it was fun to watch Natascha McElhone, who was straight out of the Wide Eye School of Acting in her role as Rheya.

The only other time we saw a movie at the Kabuki was Moulin Rouge, which we also won tickets to see in a preview screening. I really disliked that movie. Solaris I could maybe watch again if I had to, but Moulin Rouge — no thank you. Is this the beginning of a new trend? The curse of the Kabuki?

Beware.

The Bush administration is creating a scarier world than anyone realizes. As I described in last week’s post on Freemasonry, the government’s new Information Awareness Office wants to collect every little detail about every one of us. And it gets scarier. From John Poindexter, who was convicted on 5 counts of lying to Congress during Iran-Contra affair, being appointed as the guy who runs the new information office, to Bush passing laws to suppress information about past presidents, there’s sketchy stuff going on out there.

Jen emailed me this article on the topic last week, but I just read it today.

In the world today: