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Just today I discovered Google Adsense’s Category Ad Filters. I was rather dismayed to find that 2.6% of the web sites’ recent earnings were derived from ads in the category of Religion! Being a devout atheist, I have begun filtering those out, even though it potentially reduces my already razor thin profit margin.

I haven’t seen Jay for about three weeks now. A few days after his last appearance, Kay arrived one morning with a new companion. He was very quick, alert, and clever…and completely untamed. But now he will usually take peanuts from my hand, though it’s still with the hit and run technique. It is such a thrill for me to see him slowly begin to trust. At first he wouldn’t come near. Then he would cautiously approach a peanut on the table or patio, grab it quickly and fly away. After a few days he tried a couple of flights toward my outstretched hand and turned away at the last split second.

He is less obsessed with peanuts than the other jays and so spends more time away between trips, enough that I can actually get into reading a newpaper article while he’s gone. This morning it struck me how preposterous life on this planet can be. Here I was alternating between grinning from ear-to-ear when Nicky took a peanut and reading about the horrible events in the rest of the world: no relief for Myanmar’s typhoon victims and more bad weather approaching; the thousands of dead and displaced Chinese earthquake victims; the so-called mortgage “crisis” in this country; how the price of energy is straining practically everyone’s budget. Most of that is literally, a world away. Lucky me.

I am acutely aware of how fast things can change. Tomorrow, the rest of the world could be reading of the devastation in California, the result of the long predicted “Big One”. Three months ago I was depressed over having been out of work for the most of the previous 18 months. My younger son was also out of work and needed some help. Today I have a good job again, as does Matthew. The last time I was at the barber shop, I told the barber about finally getting a job. He was genuinely happy for me and said, “You know when your neighbor is out of work, it’s a recession. But when you are out of work, it’s a depression.” He really had that right!

Oh, I see the four-footed member of the club has arrived. It’s really hot today, so (s)he has come up on the patio looking for some cool to go with a peanut. I hope your Sunday morning was as relaxing and peaceful.

A week or so later, the marvelous instant hot water dispenser, which was installed with our new granite counter top and sink two and half years ago, began dispensing when no one was around. And not just into the sink but under it as well! It only had a one year warranty and I’m embarrassed to say how much we paid for it. But a phone call to the manufacturer got us a relative bargain on a replacement with a three year, in-home service warranty $152.74.

Next up: the dishwasher. It’s a little over three years old, and it gets much less use now with only the two of us in the house. Nevertheless, it seems to have gotten lazy, producing not quite clean and not quite dry dishes on a regular basis. Someone’s coming to look at it Saturday.

So you see I’m doing my part to stimulate the economy. I have practically spent my whole economic stimulus check a couple months before it even arrives!

So here is an idea to alleviate both problems. The next time you are tempted to write a check to Hillary or John or Barack, don’t. Google “foreclosure”, find a neighbor in trouble, and put the money where it will actually do some good. My Google search pointed me to Realty-Trac which says there are 551 properties in pre-foreclosure in my zipcode. I’m sure that a donation to any one of those households would be vastly more rewarding that the TV ad you won’t watch or the political junk mail you will trash without reading.

When I signed on at the bank to deal with the new account number, I found that it was already there and was still linked to all the previous statements. Good. I also saw that there was an automatic payment scheduled for my most excellent spouse’s Disney Rewards card – the minimum amount. That puzzled me. I had specifically chosen to pay the amount due when I initiated the automatic payment plan for the card, the same as I had been doing for years with the B of A Visa. It appears that the ebill from Chase, from which the Disney Visa is issued, sets the amount due and the minimum amount due the same. And there is no choice available to automatically pay it in full! This strikes me as a very sneaky way to incur some interest liability. The only way to pay in full is to go on-line to get the statement, then manually change the amount of the scheduled automatic payment. In my opinion, that diminishes the value of the automatic payment plan to practically zero in this case!

All of this makes me believe these tactics are an attempt to squeeze some money out of the credit card customers who pay their bills in full each month. If that’s you, this is yet another reason to make sure to check your statements.

Internet advertising is much harder to avoid, so I have developed a sort of write-only memory for it: it goes in but rarely comes back out. The existence of this trait was driven home to me when I recently took a couple of online surveys that started by asking if I had seen online ads for five or six different companie’s products. Later questions led me to the realization that the survey invitation had been extended because I had just seen an ad from one those companies. I couldn’t remember a thing about it!

You probably have noticed that advertising appears on this site. (Unless, perhaps you also have developed advertising-write-only memory.) The irony is not lost on me. I depend on advertising to pay for my Internet presence. (So far, that is about all it pays for.) In fact, the terms and conditions of the company that supplies the ads forbid clicking on ads on my own site, thus reinforcing the need for, and strength of, my advertising-write-only memory.

The ridiculous amount of money spent on advertising is on display in an article appearing on WashingtonPost.com: New Policy Aims to Curb Web Site Name Abuse. Domain tasting and kiting, practices I had never hear of before reading the article, have allowed some to profit handsomely by running ads on thousands of domains that are registered and released after just five days, mostly for free.

“I think it shows that the domain tasting problem was probably bigger and more lucrative than we thought it was,” Fausett said. “I think those who will be most surprised by these numbers are the Adsense advertisers, because if Google has been paying millions to these [domain tasting] guys, that means the advertisers have been paying Google even more to advertise on these sites, and it really makes you wonder what value these advertisers are really getting.”

So does advertising have any value? Obviously some of it does. But Internet advertising long ago entered the upper reaches of a logarithmic scale like that used to measure earthquakes where each numerical increase in the magnitude represents ten times more shaking – and asymptotically approaches the point where mostly write-only memory becomes truly write-once read-never.

The first part of the paper I read on Sunday is usually Parade. There were three articles today that in combination just set me off. The first was “You Have the Power” by Michael Scherer. The thrust of the article is how the Internet has made politics accessible to practically everyone and how

“YouTube, MySpace, Google, campaign Web sites and political blogs have changed the dynamic between voters and candidates.”

In a sidebar list entitled “Get in on the money game” it says “You don’t have to be rich to make a difference.” Then on page 18 came the short article “Celebs Vote With Their Checkbooks” detailing contributions made by Ellen Pompeo and Paul Newman specifically and actors in general.

Actors and actresses have given more than $585,000 to Presidential candidates so far…

Immediately adjacent is another short article “Where Your Tax Dollars Go” which ends with

“The losers? Possibly you.”

So right then and there I decided I will make a difference by getting in the money game on the Internet. I promise that if you make a donation to me, whether by cash, check, or Paypal, I will continue to blog about whatever strikes my fancy and post my photographs for you to enjoy (or disparage) for free. The value to be had for that is at least as much (and probably more) than you will get for your silly little political contributions.

I went to sleep in the wee hours of this morning with sore stomach muscles and ringing ears, both signs that youth is a memory. The soreness is a reminder of the three minutes spent spinning the Mad Teacups at Disneyland for all I was worth with Patty and Terry along for the ride. The ringing ears have been a constant for months, a reminder that the days when I could hear the singing transformer of a television’s horizontal oscillator are never coming back.

After arriving home from the excursion to Disneyland and Souplantation, Patty remarked that I had been unusually quiet all day. I had to admit that it was an effort to have a good time. It’s almost impossible not to have a good time on the rides, but the in-between times, such as the few minutes before regrouping outside a restroom in California Adventure, allow other concerns to surface.

Our future is cloudy with economic uncertainty. In some ways, it’s the best it’s ever been, but in others it’s hairy and scary. The severance package from Ericsson provided a year of paid health insurance and eligibility for their Retiree Medical Plan after that. It also included more than enough cash to pay off our mortgage as well as a small pension since I was 55 at the time of separation. But now after more than a year with no offers of permanent employment, that pension is our only source of income.

A few days ago, I was more upbeat. The first Google Adsense ads had been placed and had already earned a couple of dollars. It was a glimmer of the hoped-for-future with more freedom and less social game-playing. A later analysis of the websites’ traffic suggested that the earnings were more likely due to the curiousity of friends rather than an anonymous horde of internet surfers. Economic security retreated like the mirage it really is.

The job hunt has wrung me out like the chamois I use to dry my car after hand-washing it. There was one week a little over a year ago when I had not one, but two promising interviews. Earlier this year there were two, several months apart, where I knew immediately that they had been a waste of time. The dirt of my being now lies on the surface where it can be seen with little more than a casual glance: the only aspect of a job I miss is the income and I am and less and less willing to play the games that are expected of an employee.

One of the those interviews was with Ron Stein, the CEO of MICAD Marine in Huntington Beach. One of his questions was if I liked working at Ericsson. “I did. It was a great place to work.” The fact is, I would still be there if “there” had not ceased to exist. In hindsight, I believe that ended his interest in hiring me right then and there. A few days later he called me personally to deliver his rejection notice, the only one ever to do so. It lasted longer than the interview. The gist of it was that he wanted someone who would treat the work with the same urgency that he and is head salesman did. He was full of praise for that one because he spent something like 200 or 300 days a year on the road. It made me glad that I didn’t have to refuse an offer.

Another nudge toward independence and away from servitude came from watching a YouTube video: “Job Interview Skills“. First, I was put off by the length of this video: nearly 45 minutes. Garden variety YouTubers, like myself, are restricted to 10 minutes. Second, I was awed that anyone could talk that long without notes, in his car, in traffic, and produce a video that would garner more than 17,000 views! His channel information, especially his self-described occupation really nailed it for me: “Former software executive – now full time internet philosopher, baby! : )“. Is there some way I can skip the interviews and go directly to Money for Nothing?