Who needs social media

Who really needs social media? Why do we put up with the collection and selling of our activity data? It’s been documented over and over that we are a product to sell. Obama was cheered on that they scraped all of Facebook’s data to use it for political use, now a company used Facebook data users agreed to give them, and purely because Trump’s campaign used this company people are losing their minds.

Get off social media, find content with real value, and do your own research. If you have something to say, write a blog on a site you control

Wait has it been over a year?

Wow it looks like it has been over a year and I once again have had nothing good to say on my blog! Not sure if that is good or bad, I probably share too much stuff on Facebag but meh, it takes 2 seconds as I scroll through stuff and find it interesting or informative. The political climate has changed and normally rational people are losing it, and big tech companies would rather see themselves implode over identity politics then just make cool stuff with the world’s data. But that’s not why I write on here, it’s mostly a public spew of something’s happening to me or what not.

This new keyboard is super easy to type on but it needs a wrist wrest, let’s see if it feels better with just the old one propped up, humm yes but not as easy to move my fingers to the keys. BRB off to Amazon…

Amazon what is this a baguette wrist rest!

There the black normal one looks ok will see.

So I did start a new job doing IT, web work, and other programming. It kind of gets all the areas I am good at into one so it keeps me interested. They also have sent me on a few business trips and that has been fun because I get to see some places I probably would have never visited and get paid to do it. Another good thing is it’s in the town I have lived in and would have never though they existed but boom there it is so that’s cool. Just past 6 months so I am a permanent employee so it’s going good.

I was all interested in getting an Amateur Radio Licence but it was kind of off-putting being around the guys who do it, as most are old and just want to do contacts and can’t really get into messing with radio tech so that’s kind of lame. I think I will still go for my General licence so I have a large set of frequencies to work with, and now that I have good money coming in I could get some equipment.

My grandpa turned 90 a few months back, that’s a long time! We had a little party and all hung out with him on a long weekend and that was good. I think a thing that has kept him going was staying active, getting out and doing things, living a clean life, and keeping positive. It’s amazing to think all the things he has lived through and still have been just young enough to have missed some of the bad things. He was in World War 2 but was training after Europe was liberated and was going to get shipped to the Pacific but was probably saved by the dropping of the bombs and the end of the war. He ended up spending his time in the service helping guys get home so that’s still a necessary task. Because he and my grandma grew up after the great depression they were very frugal and did some good investments, resulting in an active retirement from a bank locksmith.

Any way I am working hard at a new job, still need to finish my degree, just some pesky math classes getting in my way but I will try to do them around working. I also haven’t don any robotics or programming things in a while so I probably should do some of that, along with reading since I really haven’t had time or willpower to do much of that after a full day at work. I think I will be starting to plan out a new computer build soon. The new generation of processors are out, and a lot of things are down in price due to some economic booming and I actually have some money haha. Humm those guys I worked for last winter still owe me a few thousand… Anyway say no to Socialism and work hard and enjoy the rewards.

ARRL Request to Contact Your US Senators Supporting the Amateur Radio Parity Act

Dear ARRL member,

I am writing to you today because we are at a crossroad in our efforts to obtain passage of The Amateur Radio Parity Act.

Our legislative efforts scored a major victory in our campaign when The Amateur Radio Parity Act, H.R. 1301, passed in the House of Representatives yesterday, September 12th. The legislation now moves to the Senate, where we need every Senator to approve the bill.

You are one of over 730,000 licensed Amateur Radio Operators living in the United States.  Many of you already live in deed-restricted communities, and that number grows daily.

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL HAMS TO GET INVOLVED IN THE PROCESS!

  • If you want to have effective outdoor antennas but are not currently allowed to do so by your Home Owner’s Association, SEND THESE EMAILS TODAY!!
  • If you already have outdoor antennas, but want to support your fellow hams, SEND THESE EMAILS TODAY!!
  • If you want to preserve your ability to install effective outdoor antennas on property that you own, SEND THESE EMAILS TODAY!!

We need you to reach out to your Senators TODAY!  Right away.

Help us in the effort.  Please go to this linked website and follow the prompts:

https://arrl.rallycongress.net/ctas/urge-senate-to-support-amateur-radio-parity-act

Thank you.

73,

Rick

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Rick Roderick, K5UR
President
ARRL, the national association for Amateur Radio®

It has been some time…

Humm it has been some time since I have posts on this site let alone even check up on it. I let it do its updates and that’s about it. Do I not have anything to blog about? Not sure, there has been a lot going on in my life between school, programming projects, robotics, 3D printing, movies, TV shows, events I have been involved with. I don’t know but I guess blogging has been something I forgot about. There is lots of places to post junk but I don’t even do much if any posting on sites like Google+ or Facebook.

It may have something to do with the fact that I want to rebuild this site as a blog but not on WordPress because I don’t see the value in WordPress or its junk ecosystem. I have other sites I should be posting about my projects as I get closer to the end of my CS degree. Like my profile site has been rebuilt quickly to clean out a broken Drupal install. I have some plans on how to make that into a better repository of my work / projects. But that stuff doesn’t need to be here.

Typing this has been kind of interesting… But I should be working on some code I also want to get done. But writing words about something is different than code. And this post will be some rambling any way. My site visits have dropped a lot, mostly because a LifeHacker writer rewrote my post on Handbrake DVD ripping and no longer link over. I have also not been able to get Handbrake to work on my system last time I tried 6 months ago.

It’s late and this post wont make much since, I will probably rebuild the site and put my code snippets here using my own CMS setup. Mehh

Adblock This…

2015-02-15 01_35_33-Cryptograms.org - HomeI really hate how sites that have lots of ads always try to guilt you if you block the ads you had no plan on ever looking at or clicking. Take the screen shot in this post, the site says they spend $20,000 on hosting. What that’s a crazy amount of money for a site is not main stream. What are they spending over $1,600 a month on most dedicated server hosting costs for a good server $200-400 a month that could handle anything this site could send to it.

OK so that is a lot of money for servers so this guy must be poor and not make any money. But look you can get a “Premium Ad Free” account with them for $0.11 per day, that adds up to a few cents over $40 per year. Doesn’t sound too bad right? Well if you look at their forms used for registration on the site there are 30,306 registered members. And if only say 25% of them are so into this site they pay the $40 a year to be a “Premium” member that is a nice $303,060 little lump of cash. Even at 10% your looking at $121,224 a year from such members.

Those calculations of well over $100,000 a year of income from premium members didn’t include money made from ads that almost everyone else dose not block and may click from time to time because they get tricked into clicking on ads when they though that the ad was part of the site. The money from ads can be quite large for a site with good amounts of traffic that this site seems to get based on users. My own site that I have 2 ads per page on gets on average 100 views a day gets me about $100 a year or every other year. I don’t push my ads, I don’t care if you block them, its cool to get a little extra money but that isn’t the content of the site.

I just get tired of people acting like because people block the ads, the trackers, the like buttons, the email list pop ups that they are some how ripping off or making it so the site can’t possibly survive if you don’t see the ads. If I am looking for something to buy I go looking for it, I don’t need some ad to tell me to buy it. The ads just confuse people most of the time, are not entirely relevant, and distracting from why I went to a site. So I will continue to block ads and I don’t care for one instance your site will not exist if you don’t get me to see your crappy ads.