Google, Apple, Yahoo - all down for a few minutes and now back up. Bruce Damer mentioned an electrical storm was heading through Silicon Valley...

Good night.

One letter away from family

There are very few Barbalets. In fact, the only addition to Barbalets in recent times has come through marriage and not birth. It's a club people want to join but not be born into.

I was searching the USPTO on a sanity game patent (aka 6,935,954). My thoughts were whilst the cognitive dissidence and effects on movement were found in the original Noble Ape Manuals.

As one does, I did a cosmetic search and found a patent relating to Barbalet's Lemma. I thought to myself - I know most of the Barbalets, I wonder which one was responsible for the Lemma.

Well, it turns out it isn't Barbalet, it's Barbalat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IsL

And there's a whole gang of Barbalats online;

http://www.google.com/search?q=Barbalat

My favourite is Lev Barbalat who has a connection with Technion. I was awarded a scholarship to Technion in 1996, but never took it. Lev has the hotmail account barbalat. I have the hotmail account barbalet. There's also Roman Barbalat at UCLA. I seem to get to LA more frequently than most other places. I should look him up when I'm next there.

The thing that strikes me about the Barbalats is that they could almost be Barbalets. And unlike the Barbalet name which is a creation, Barbalat is a good Ukrainian name.

Michele thinks I'm nuts. But she has always had a large family and a very common last name up until she joined this crazy clan of misfits.

Good night.

I earned $4.95 today through AdSense. Write about AdSense being a vehicle that profits scam artists and people who tailor sites purely for earnings - mysteriously your AdSense revenue goes up. My nearest day was three bucks and some change on Christmas Eve 2005. Ironically most of the clicks were on the Noble Ape site through the ads with the highest possible returns.

Something is reversing the trend. There is no statistical reason why I would earn so much today through the specific clicks that would raise the most revenue.

In any case, I have a mailout to write.

Good night.

Funk-room Boy

It's quite an eclectic mix of WeFunk this evening and there is a lot to write about. Per an earlier entry, I rediscovered the Mushroom Boy project recently. A development spin off from Noble Ape with the following synopsis.

An introverted socially-isolated 16-year-old boy genius builds a small nuclear device. Once his nuclear capabilities have been discovered he has to flee from secret service agents with his device. He travels mainly on foot through the city, eventually hiding in the wilderness with the assistance of militant green groups.

Setting

The game begins late one evening in the boy's family home which is surrounded by secret service agents. The boy must find a way to flee his home, with the device (hidden under his house) and escape from the secret service agents through the suburban and city areas. Eventually moving from the city to the jungle.

The game is not based in a particular location. The city environment within the game will be textured by American, European, South-East Asian and Australian cities. It is set in the present day.

Game-Play

The game is designed to showcase the Virtualia environment. The player of the game from the start of the game has the ability to venture through the whole city and surrounding suburbs. Most of the population of the city is unsupportive to the boy and act as a droid-like backdrop to his avoidance of the secret service agents and attempts to find young militants willing to assist him.

The game is played through a first person perspective interface. The player sees through the boy's eyes and has the ability to interact with the Virtualian environment including talking with Virtualians. The game concludes either when the device is detonated, when the secret service agents catch the boy or when the boy 'disappears'. The victorious solution is the boy 'disappearing' which may include escaping to another country or negotiating with the secret service.

Background

The game explores a societal distrust of youth, perceptions of terrorism and political power and the socially unstructured pathway from adolescence to adulthood. It will be released through the internet for Mac and PC users in a demo form and a later more detailed version will follow in early 2000. The game will be developed as a test scenario for Virtualia. Enabling the virtual reality and human-simulation elements of the project to be tested and publicised through a game.

Copyright 1998, Tom Barbalet.

Completely politically incorrect now. But a project worth resurrecting just in terms of the huge suburban environments.

Breaking real time news: Static played a Nomadic Massive track - I made a request for Nomadic Massive track from Static but I suspect he would have played it anyway. Butta rapped in Spanish. He seems to only rap in Spanish now. Disappointing. ... In fact, Groove just announced that Nomadic Massive is in the CKUT studios for a preview of the EP. Hopefully there will be some free-styles. WeFunk is now playing Iraqi music... I return to my musings.

AdSense Revisited

From 9 November 2005, I have run AdSense on most of my sites. I'm about to break the mythical $50 mark. Assuming that I spend an hour a day producing content, I'm paid far less than 50c/hour for my work. Here's the interesting number, more than 20,000 ad impressions since 9 November 2005.

The statistics on AdSense are phenomenal but no real rewards for delivering so much advertising content for Google. My feeling is that when I reach the payout total of $100, all the ads will go down. Never to return. It's a system that rewards people with particular kinds of content and scam artists. For those of us creating real content and heavy doses of musing, AdSense doesn't produce revenue.

I mentioned this to Bruce Damer. He has switched all the Digibarn pages to AdSense and made less than I seem to through Noble Ape et al. More than a thousand, unique handwritten pages on various kinds of obscure computers. He's lucky if he makes 80c per day.

Insane.

Dana Plato?

Michele was unwell during the week and whilst recuperating she saw an episode of E True Hollywood Story on Diff'rent Strokes. ''Dana Plato lived in our apartment complex!''

We live in the most run down apartment complex in one of the nicest parts of Las Vegas. According to Michele the E show covered the area and identified it as the place where Dana Plato couldn't get a maintenance job leading her to hold up a video store with a pellet gun. I'm waiting for a repeat sometime I can see it.

Good night.