Blog Master G

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws.

As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for America’s representative democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized. These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power restored to our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation.

– Al Gore on on Constitutional Issues, January 16, 2006.

The Daily Kos has weaved together excerpts from Gore’s speech yesterday with that most famous speech in 1963 by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint.

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.

I’ve attended a number of funerals in my life, but never before Friday had I driven in an official funeral procession. My car was one of five, including the hearse, and we drove from the funeral home in my grandfather’s town, Monroeville, to the cemetary in nearby Pittsburgh. This included time both on and off the highway. The first car in line was the escort car from the funeral home, followed by the hearse. Next in line was a car driven by my uncle, then my car, and bringing up the rear was a car driven by my cousin. It was a small burial attended only by family and one close friend.

Here are my observations about driving in the funeral procession:

• The funeral director placed a green flag with white lettering (“Funeral”), attached to a magnetic anchoring device, on the driver-side roof of every vehicle
• All vehicles but the hearse used the hazzard lights the entire procession
• Other vehicles respected the procession and yielded to us
• When the beginning of the procession had gone through a green light that was red by the time the end went through, we proceeded through and other cars yielded to us
• On the highway, whether the speed limit was 55 or 65 miles per hour, we drove no faster than 40 MPH
• It was confusing, habitually speaking, not to use turn signals since the hazzards were on the whole time

After arriving at the cemetary, Jen and I, along with my cousins, uncle, and the funeral directors, were the pallbearers. It was my second time as a pallbearer, and the experience is always an honor. We laid my grandpa to rest on the unusually sunny January day.

On the way back to town, we passed three establishments — in order — bearing each of my names: Ryan’s Pub, then Gabriel’s something or other, and finally, Elmer’s Aquarium Pet Center.

During the final 30 minutes of Thursday’s eight-hour drive to Pittsburgh for my grandfather’s funeral, I was pulled over. I was (allegedly) doing 80 in a 65, but driving in the slow lane and being passed by a number of folks doing at least 90 with Pennsylvania plates. Cops love to get out-of-staters because they see us as easy revenue since they figure we won’t bother fighting the ticket. It was my first speeding ticket in nearly 3 years, and only my second in nearly 10 years.

The guy who pulled us over was a robot. He simply asked for my license and registration, told me he clocked me doing 80 in a 65, and that I was getting a ticket. End of story. He didn’t bother asking me what my hurry was or making small talk. Though I don’t necessarily like the idea of using my grandfather’s funeral as an excuse to get out of a ticket, it still would’ve been a pretty good excuse, right?

I’ve always had the worst luck with driving in Pennsylvania. In 1998 or so, Jonty and I drove to Chicago from Vassar for a college journalism conference. Between us, we got pulled over about 3 times during the trip. Luckily, I managed to get out of the ticket both times I was pulled over. On the return trip, I was being careful not to speed… well, to only speed a little bit. I was only going about 5 miles per hour over the limit. It was the middle of the night and we were alone on the road. A trooper going the other way saw me, turned around, chased me down, and pulled me over.

When the trooper came to my window, he asked me to go with him and had me sit in the front seat of his patrol car. After a few minutes, he said under his breath, “How much money do you have?” Nervously, I told him that we were college students and only had enough for gas money and gas station snacks for our return trip. Silence. “What about your buddy up there?” (referring to Jonty in the passenger seat of the car). I told him that we were sharing a budget. Silence. He wrote something on a piece of paper. “Oh great,” I thought. “I’m getting a ticket.” He handed me a dark yellowish-orange slip of paper. It was a “friendly reminder” from the Pennsylvania highway patrol to slow down.

I could’ve used one of those friendly reminders on Thursday.

I spent four of the greatest years of my life at Vassar. I met countless friends, many of whom remain my closest friends today. I partied. I learned. And I even met she who would be my wife. Not too shabby for four years.

Frances Fergusson was President of Vassar for 20 years, including the four I was there, and announced about a year ago that she would step down at the end of this academic year. Here’s a photo of me and the rest of the 1999 Senior Class Council, including Phil, chillin’ with Fran at her pad:

It was announced yesterday via an email to alums that the Board of Trustees of Vassar College has named its 10th President, Catharine Bond (Cappy) Hill. The news was big enough to make a New York Times Metro briefing:

POUGHKEEPSIE: VASSAR TO NAME NEW PRESIDENT Catharine B. Hill, an economics professor and provost at Williams College, is expected to be named today as president of Vassar College. She would take office on July 1, succeeding Frances D. Fergusson, who has been president since 1986. Dr. Hill, 51, who is known as Cappy, received her bachelor’s degree at Williams, studied at Oxford, and earned her doctorate at Yale, and has worked extensively in development economics and the economics of higher education. She became provost at Williams in 1999. Her previous posts include the World Bank, the Congressional Budget Office and the Ministry of Finance in Zambia.KAREN W. ARENSON (NYT)

This is exciting news for the Vassar community, and will no doubt continue to reinforce (and maybe even improve) our ranking as the #13 liberal arts college in the country.

Congratulations, Vassar! And welcome aboard, President Cappy. I’m excited to see you do good things for my alma mater.

“Nothing is worth more than this day.”
– Goethe

Donald A. Campbell
January 7, 1919 – January 9, 2006

Donald Campbell, the last of my original four grandparents, passed away late last night. He is survived by my obasan Tomiko, my mom, and my uncle Bruce. I last saw grandpa Don when I visited him and the rest of my Pennsylvania/Ohio family in September 2004. We had a really fun dinner together, and grandpa Don was having a jolly ol’ time, despite suffering from Alzheimer’s for the past decade. I also spent some time with him in late 2003 during our cross-country drive.

Growing up the opposite side of the country from Grandfather, I never really had the chance to know him as well as I would have liked to, but I know that he was an incredibly kind, caring, and intelligent man. He and Tomiko came to visit us nearly every Christmas while Peter and I were growing up. He was an engineer by training, so I’m sure the technical side of my brain can be traced to his genes. I’ll never forget the year he built the driveway basketball hoop for us. That hoop brought me, my brother, and all our childhood friends hours of entertainment, day and night, for many years. By the time my family left that house in 1995, Peter and I had been dunking balls on the eight-foot rim for years.

Grandfather helped inspire and partially fund my wonderful education from the day I turned 1. He and Tomiko sent me a savings bond for college every year without fail. By the time I went to college, I cashed in the savings bonds that had matured. Some of them have still not fully matured, so I’ve hung onto them in hopes that one day my children will be able to use them for part of their education, and I can tell them that their great grandfather helped pay for their education, too.

Grandpa Don is the third family member I’ve lost in four years, following Nana in 2002 and Patty in 2003.

This latest loss is yet another reminder to live every day to the fullest, never taking your life or the time you spend with family and friends for granted. I know I appreciate every day I’m alive, and I’m so grateful to have such a wonderful wife, family, and friends.

Rest in peace, Grandfather. You’ll be missed.

After a few long days and nights Thursday through Saturday (hit the town two nights in a row, followed by a dinner party at Anne and Tom’s place), Jen and I decided to treat ourselves to sleeping in Sunday; we slept until 11:30am yesterday. I had decided by noon that I wanted to go skiing for the afternoon. I really love this whole living in the foothills of the Adirondacks thing.

So ski I did. I was on the Northway by 1pm heading to Gore. I arrived at 10 till 2 with a parking spot right at the front of the lot — another benefit of skiing only in the afternoon is getting a great spot and not having to park down the hill and take a shuttle, as is the case if you arrive in the morning for a full day of skiing — and was in the gondola by 2pm.

I had two full hours of awesome skiing. The snow was a bit icier than last time and the sun only peeked out for a moment, but I had a great time nonetheless. I tend to wear my sunglasses when skiing since they’re prescription, so I can see better. However, yesterday I probably would’ve been better off wearing goggles, despite not being able to see as well. Goggles are the way to go when it’s not as sunny, and they also help with the wind in the eyes when cruising down the hill.

On my last gondola ride of the day, I had a strange and unfortunate glimpse into the future of America. It made me not want to have children of my own if they were to turn out like the little punks with whom I shared the gondola, but also made me want to have children of my own to balance out the population and help keep everyone in the next generation from being a bastard. I reluctantly climbed into a gondola with four foul-mouthed pre-teens — no older than 12 or 13. They carried on as if I wasn’t sitting in between two of them, and clearly didn’t see me as an authority figure. The entire six-minute gondola ride was a non-stop barrage of insulting each other (“You’re gay, you fag!” “You’re a chode!” “Your mom’s a rent-a-cop and makes $2 an hour!”), talking tough (“I was at the mall and this rent-a-cop asked me if I was 18, and I walked right past him!”), and demonstrating a total disregard and lack of respect for living creatures (“I was at the mall once and I went to the pet store and I grabbed this rabbit and I shook the stupid thing. It was funny.”). I considered speaking up and putting the little bastards in line, but decided against it since it was almost more interesting to have this rare glimpse into the youth of America (rare for someone like me who’s not a teacher and doesn’t spend much time around kids these days). I knew that had I said anything, they would’ve shut right up and I would’ve missed out on witnessing their shenanigans. That, and after our six-minute ride together, any comments I made would probably have gone not to make a difference in their lives, but would’ve been fodder for later calling me the old chode in the gondola.

For a while, I had been experiencing this really annoying problem with Firefox — I’m using the latest version, Firefox 1.5 — wherein opening a new tab (or control-clicking a bookmark to open a new tab, which I do often) would cause the whole browser window to resize slightly. Depending on the smaller size of the resized window, the shift would sometimes be very slight, but it was enough to make me nuts. It seemed to happen more often with Gmail than other sites.

Yesterday I finally figured out what the culprit was: In Tools -> Options -> Tabs, “Hide the tab bar when only one web site is open” was checked. Uncheck this bad boy and you’re good to go. All this does when it’s unchecked is show you your primary tab as a tab if you only have one open, which is kind of cool anyway, and a very small price to pay for the most annoying little glitch ever

Hopefully the good folks at Mozilla will fix this little bug in a future release.

As my regular readers may have noticed, I’ve been playing around lately with different ad styles and placements for my Google AdSense ads. I’ve been reviewing Google’s tips for ad optimization and watching the results. So far, so good. With every change I’ve made, I’ve seen a slight increase in the number of daily clicks I’m receiving throughout my site. Nothing too crazy, but interesting to watch the results.

I’ve also been doing a bunch of reading lately about people who actually make a living from AdSense by managing Web sites with tons of content and traffic. There are videos, e-books, and even software about AdSense — all to help teach you how to create content that attracts lots of visitors to your site and to help you optimize ad style, placement, and strategy. It’s amazing how a whole new market has evolved around AdSense. Well-known bloggers like Chris Parillo claim to make thousands of dollars per month with AdSense. Before Google offered direct deposit for payment, those AdSense publishers who made $10,000 or more per month received delivery of check by UPS, so they’re known as members of the UPS club. Pretty amazing.

As with anything else, there’s really no secret to making money with AdSense, and there’s certainly no overnight success. As you might guess, it’s all about content. Writing good content, building an audience, and providing relevant, targeted ads to your readers via the AdSense program. Easier said than done, right?

This little site gets about 20,000 unique visitors per month. That isn’t too shabby, but it’s a far cry from people who make a living blogging. I’m certainly not going to retire anytime soon with my AdSense revenue, but as long as I’m blogging and continue to do it for the love of writing and sharing my life and thoughts with the world, then why not earn a little extra dough each month?

It’s a nice side benefit, but not at all the reason I create content nearly every day. When I first started to blog in November 2000, the thought that I actually might make some cash for my efforts was the last thing on my mind.

What I hate, and have seen from time to time, is people who steal content from others just to make money from it by putting ads alongside stolen content. I’ve seen snippets lifted from my blog before, too, solely for this purpose. Sure, I quote other sources from time to time, but that’s completely different — it’s usual in order to comment on it, and I always give credit where credit’s due.

As I’ve written about recently, Google Video is a lot of fun. Along with watching all the awesome things it has to offer, you can add your own movies, in the true spirit of a grassroots site. Not long ago I uploaded a couple of my own videos for all the world — and you! — to enjoy:

Gabe & Jen watch a gondola in Venice go by

Shannon talks to tilt-head Stella

Gabe the Producer has arrived. Oscars here I come.

My wife is an Internet rock star and I didn’t even know it. Those of us who have been involved in this Web thing for a long time no doubt know about the Wayback Machine, a very cool site that archives the Web as it evolves. For example, do a search for gabeanderson.com and you’ll see search results for the site from 1996, when the archive began, through present day. Click on the gabeanderson.com from October 1, 1999 and you’ll see how it looked at that moment (I also have that version archived here). Similarly, you can see what all your favorite sites like Google or Yahoo looked like in their early days on the Web.

So for those of us who love the Internet and love to archive things, the Wayback Machine is a very cool thing.

What’s even cooler, as I learned last night, is that you can find my wife’s name right smack on the home page of the Contributors section of the Wayback Machine. Back when she was my girlfriend and working at Amazon subsidiary Alexa, Jennifer Deane was helping to archive the Web. How cool is that? Her coolness factor just increased. Our good friend Johnny is also included on the list of Wayback Machine Contributors.

Gmail.pro. Yakalike, via LifeHacker.