r3dux.org

Nice enough tune for something so mainstream…

See her do a decent (if a bit video-wobbly) acoustic version on Jools Holland here.

Interesting quote from the Financial Times:

The rain beats down on a small Irish town. The streets are deserted. Times are tough. Everyone is in debt and living on credit. A rich German arrives at the local hotel, asks to view its rooms, and puts on the desk a €100 note. The owner gives him a bunch of keys and he goes off for an inspection.

As soon as he has gone upstairs, the hotelier grabs the note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher hurries down the street to pay what he owes to his feed merchant. The merchant heads for the pub and uses the note to pay his bar bill. The publican slips the note to the local hooker who’s been offering her services on credit. She rushes to the hotel to pay what she owes for room hire. As she puts the €100 note on the counter, the German appears, says the rooms are unsuitable, picks up his €100 note and leaves town.

No one did any work. No one earned anything. Everyone is out of debt. Everyone is feeling better. And that is how a bail-out works.

It’s possible that you’re not running adblocking plugins, and that you can see adverts on this page (and indeed every page) of this site. That’ll be because I put them there; I’ve sold out… Hurrah! =D

If you’re not seeing the adverts, then let me give you a screengrab to show some of the joy that you’re missing out on:

Not that dramatic a change, is it? And these are the only two locations I’m going to use for ads – full stop. Ever.

The main reason that I’ve decided to sell my soul is that I had to switch hosting providers the other day because the bargain-basement VPS I’d signed up for gave me bargain-basement up-time (should have seen that one coming, shouldn’t I?) – so I’ve migrated the site across to a higher quality VPS with a company called linode.com, and guess what? It’s fast, stable, reliable, and has enough dedicated resources to handle the site including some room for growth, but the down side of you get what you pay for comes at the end of that particular truism – because it’s not particularly cheap…

Therefore, I’ve put two (count ‘em!) adverts up through Google AdSense to try to recoup at least part of the couple of hundred bucks I’ve had to put in to keep the site up and running. I’ve selected to use targeted ads, so they should be something relevant to each page, and you’ll never see any diet-pills/viagra/political/religious or get-rich-quick schemes because they’re on my list of blocked categories. In fact, if you’re running ad-blocking software such as AdBlock Plus, you won’t even see the ads at all – and that’s fine too

I just thought that as I’m working part-time and studying, if I could get few bucks to throw in towards my hosting costs it’d leave me with a little more left over for blackjack and hookers textbooks and beer. And if I don’t make anything at all through them, then I’ll just suck it up and pay it all myself – no harm/no foul.

Just thought that if I could get the site to pay for itself by people occasionally clicking on an interesting or relevant ad or two, then all the better.

Cheers!

Update: I’ve moved the top banner advert which was in the header to the footer instead so it’s less prominent and you’re only ever going to come across it if you’ve read an entire page or article.

Ha! Good point, well made.

The only problems being you have to know or find a place to padlock your bike, the weather (it’s winter in the AU atm – and its rained about 20 out of the last 21 days ), and I need to cart a minimum of two bags to school each day… Bah! Excuses, excuses.