Does manipulating Adsense make me happy?

Just now I surfed out to a link on a physics magazine (yes, a physics magazine, so sue me for being a geek) and was reading a story about a scientist who built some contraption to measure happiness. Sounds interesting. But I haven't read beyond the first sentence because I noticed that the magazine is suplementing their income by using Google Adsense. Now I understand using Adsense. I do it too, mostly out of curiosity to see how much I would have to write everyday to make the kind of money that Heather Armstrong does. (The answer is, it doesn't matter, cuz I'll never be as funny as her.)

OK, so back to adsense. Adsense tries to make it's ads topical by looking at the content of the page. The story on this page is about happiness. And BOTH of the ads are for Dianetics. This isn't the first time I have seen this happen. I've seen ads for them show up on religious blogs as well. But it still cracks me up to see it happen.

So today's blog is mostly an experiment to see if I can write 3 short paragraphs about happiness and joy and get a Dianetics ad. Granted, I'm also seeding the story with the name of the book, but I really think that I would be happy with my life if I could get an ad from the folks in Clearwater FL. So, herewith I post my experiment, check my ads, possibly edit this post with results, and then go back to read the physics blog.

ETA: Dang. The two ads that appeared for ME right after posting were for a cable cooking show and a teeth whitener. I don't want to write anything more specific, because then this edit will skew the results. And that wouldn't make me happy.

More Stuntsurfing

It seems I find myself in one of those funks where nothing that I contemplate writing on seems worthy of putting on pixels. And yet, nearly all the feedback I get on my blog is positive. So in a strange way, it seems that the logical thing to do is keep blogging more frequently until someone complains about it. And then, hopefully, fix the quality. There, enough of the navel-gazing.

A month or so ago, I discovered a site called http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ which I find to be one of the most clever titles on the internet. (Secondary, however, to

let me that for you)

ANNNYway. DownForEveryoneOrJustMe does just what it looks like. Checks a website from someplace else, with a different browser, to see if the website is really down. Clever, huh? Wait, you haven't heard all of the fun yet. As part of this service, if someone DOES find a site down (which is suspect is less than .0001% of the time.) it puts the name of that website into a RSS feed. (Don't ask me how I know this, I don't remember.) So I subscribed to that feed, just to see what sorts of websites are having trouble on most days. As you might suspect, there are some websites that show up frequently, (like http://xbox360iso.com) and lots of little sites that you've never heard of, and lots of misspellings. What's interesting is when a big site that you know well shows up. This last week, 4chan.org has been showing up occasionally.

Now I recognize that 4chan is a big site, and that I should know what they are, but I don't. So I did some research, thinking that I might be sitting here and blogging later today (huh. Look at that. I AM blogging.) So, I wiki'd it and it says its an imageboard, which doesn't mean a thing to me, and that it was involved in Project Chanology. Ah. That's where I've heard this before. Project Chanology was responsible for a DDOS attack against the Church of Scientology a while back. OK, so that's all I really know about them. Then I decided to take a look. But my Pr0n filter got in the way. And here's the funny part. It seems that 4chan.org violates EVERY SINGLE criteria in my filter. Check this out.
OK, so that's a bad picture, but I think you get the point.

So, now I'm off to disable my filter and get me some of that good Adult-Alcohol-Tasteless- Lingerie-bikini-Sexuality-Nudity-Pornography-Weapons-Chat Message Boards fun.

See you next week.