I have long thought the Internet needed a tip jar. I felt so strongly about this that back in 2003 I spent some time building my own online feed aggregator, which had the ambition of collecting feedback (like Digg) and later monetizing by allowing users, should they desire, to “share the wealth” back to site authors. Say, if you’d marked 50 pages that you like, and decided to chuck in $5, the site could take your $5 and try to give, say, 10 cents to each site. In this way people could gain some modest remuneration for the Internet publishing efforts.
Of course, that was a bit ambitious for me and the project was scrapped when I scored full-time employment.
Briefly, the idea is you can earmark sites for tips of various sizes, then send in a few dollars via PayPal. Tipjoy will then pass the tips along to site authors. They profit by collecting a 3% transaction fee, and I assume they get some float off their PayPal balance as well. At this time authors “cash out” via Amazon.com gift certificates or by sending the money off to charity. That is for legal reasons though it sounds like they hope to traffic in cash in the future.They recently added the ability to cash out via PayPal as well, and deposit to a checking account is a planned feature.
I added a tip jar down in the feedback section below. I set the default to a modest 2 cents. I’m more curious than anything as to how many folks would bother to spread the karma.
I was just mulling over proposition 8 and how happy I am to see that Google and Apple have each taken a public stand against it. So, I figured I’d shoot a brief message off to upper management suggesting how proud I would be if my employer were also to take a stand in defense of civil rights.
Then I wondered that other people may have similar sentiments and similar inclinations to share their feelings with their management. I’m not holding my breath that my company will take a stand, but it doesn’t hurt to share the idea.
I consider it a hard-won blessing that I work in an industry where I can feel comfortable openly expressing my support for the rights of homosexual people.
UPDATE: Due to multiple requests, a “sample text” that folks should feel free to steal / adapt for their own purposes:
Boss,
I think it has been great that both Google and Apple Computer have both publicly stood in defense of the diversity of their employees and their community and made a public stand against Proposition 8.
My happy joy toy arrived today. So far, no love. It ties in to your Gmail account, see? But I have a hosted Gmail account. Rumor has it that hosted gmail accounts work, but when I try to log on I get this error message:
Sorry…
This account cannot be used on the phone because it is missing the following application: cl. Please contact the domain administrator for toldme.com or sign in using another account.
Alas, there is no information to be found on the Internets, and since I have a mere “standard” hosted gmail account I am not entitled to contact Google about the problem. So, I posted a message to their web “help forum” and we’ll see if someone knows. Meanwhile I guess I switch back to my old Sidekick and figure out how to migrate all the data I have stored on that device to the new thingus. With any luck I can shake down some Google employees for some technical support. I hope this isn’t another general case of “eff you hosted domain losers!!”
NOTE: A Google employee has already offered the guess that “cl” may be the Calendar application, so I’m seeing if I can make something happen . . .
UPDATE: According to a reliable source, there is a bug related to registering G1 accounts on hosted domains that surfaced this evening, October 21. They are working feverishly to fix this issue, and I hope we’ll be online tomorrow, October 22.
UPDATE:dannyman@toldme.com is now using his G1 as intended. Yay!!
My new toy is due to arrive on Wednesday. This morning I asked myself “where is my G1?” I cast about on the ‘net for answers. T-Mobile’s web site explained to look up the tracking number on at UPS’es web site, so I wrote them and asked where’s my tracking number? Then I peeked at the forums and saw that I can use my cell number as my tracking number! Pretty slick!
The next thing I did after that was to get my real tracking number from the UPS web site, stick that in Google, then bookmark the link to that page so I can just check that bookmark over the next couple of days to see if my widget has arrived yet in the mail.
One thing I have begun to do is leave low-value cards at the fare machine. That way I don’t have to screw around with "add fare" in the train station which can suck if you’re caught without change. I figure someone purchasing a new fare card can use the buck I leave behind.
The other day I saw someone leave a $0.05 at the machine in San Bruno.
Trivia: this is the 1,004th post in my WordPress installation. And of course, that represents only a portion of my journal from the past decade. I surpassed 1,000 posts earlier today while migrating some of the travel log from HTML into WordPress, which is one of my less exciting ways to kill time on a weekend.
I had previously bought some stock at $2.10 a share, you know, as a gamble. First time I ever bought stock in an individual company. Well, I lost on that one. No biggie.
I like how amid the financial turmoil, that my bank can fail, and that immediately, I am a customer at some other bank. That’s really swell. We call that “graceful degradation.” Go go FDIC!
Still, I am a little sad. I liked Washington Mutual. Now my bank matches my credit card. Enh.
I hate mobile phones. I have had a Sidekick2 forever because it lets me jot down notes and do e-mail and IM and check things on the web. But I fricking hate talking on mobile phones! I have been tempted to ditch the expense and hassle of carrying a device around all the time and move back to index cards and save myself $50-$60 per month. Alas, a mobile phone is basically required of any SysAdmin. In the past year I have had the good fortune of working at a larger company, where I’m only on-call for two weeks every other month. So, I have begun to leave the mobile device not-on-my-person when I’d like to relax. It is kind of a bummer for people who want to call me, but the tranquility does me good.
Anyway, the HTC Android “Google Phone” was announced yesterday. I bit the bullet and pre-ordered an upgrade for my trusty old Sidekick2. After all, a lot of the same team who designed the Sidekick went to work on Android, and the large company I work for is sending out the bonus checks this week. I’m starting to get a little excited at the idea of having a GPS device, because mapping is so hot. But the other win for me is to annoy the iPhone people.
Because I am a cantankerous old mobile-phone hater, I’m also naturally annoyed at the whole iDong Mac fanboy spectacle. The iPhone is that first fancy phone, but my soul reviles at the thought of paying a premium to get locked into the whole iTunes racket and . . . ugh. It is a toy! The open development platform is going to be a nice improvement on the Apple-mediated iPlatform. Anyway, the other reason I’m looking forward to getting the new Android is to steal the self-satisfaction from my iPhone comrades. “My phone does all that janky stuff too, but it costs me somewhat less and I have greater freedom.”
What is neat about mobile phones and other “micro-computers” is that there is no dominant operating environment yet. Apple and Google are trying to get in early, and doing a better job at it than Microsoft, and it is refreshing that Google’s device emphasizes open source and platform portability. We’re going to get to replay the “OS Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s all over again and I honestly think the Android platform has a lot of potential to dominate. I personally believe that in the next few years it will have surpassed Apple a great deal, because much as MS-DOS was licensed to a growing horde of PC makers, Android seeks to live on many devices, and Apple, just as in the old days, will become that special province with 10% market share of loyal Apple weenies. I liked Apple weenies a lot more when they were persecuted oddballs. These days they’re just irritating.
The following bit of advice, while not of my creation, has been well-received of late:
You’ve been meeting folk but there are those who you’d rather avoid, and you delete them from your phone. Later, they call and you answer because the number looks familiar: maybe it is a family or coworker! Awkwardness ensues.
Solution? Keep the number, but change the name to “Do Not Answer” — especially if you may have a tendency to get drunk / lonely.
I do not actually use this strategy, but I read it a couple years ago and its re-telling was recently well-received, so I thought I’d share.
/d
Me? I recently changed my voicemail to explain that I tend to avoid my mobile phone altogether and that e-mail works far better. I really dislike talking on the damn thing. It makes my brain warm and leaves me feeling anxious. Yeah, I’m weird.
Lately I have taken to reduced caffeine. During the week, I drink tea. On the weekend I head out to the cafe and enjoy a chocolate croissant and a black cup of coffee, which leaves me bold and reckless. Last weekend I picked up some paints at the hardware store, with no clear goal in mind. I used up the yellow painting the wall of my dining area, then felt inspired to render a Swedish Flag with the blue. I’m pretty pleased with the result. I think there may be a bit more to come.
Just kidding. I recently got inspired to draw a fairly absurd cartoon:
Dating is an adventure, for sure. I went for a more “informal” feel here, doing the text all freehand. I have mixed feelings about the result, but it is better to produce than to procrastinate.
And since you bought the DVD, here’s the bonus material–the “making of” the above comic:
A few weeks back I trekked over to Japantown to pick up some good pens at Kinokuniya. I pencil the thing in, then go over it with ink. In this case, I settled on a 0.7mm Zebra Hyper Jell for the text and a finer 0.5mm Sarasa Stick for the figure. I have a 0.8mm Uniball Vision Elite but that is complete crap compared the the fancy Japanese pens.
And yes, let the ink dry before erasing the pencil. Unfortunately with these finer pens it takes some off the ink out too.
I spend a few minutes most mornings at the bus shelter at 19th Ave and Taraval. In July, they featured this public-service ad on the street side of the shelter, encouraging black youth to “stay alive and free” eating mama’s home cooking, rather than the cuisine associated with orange jumpsuits:
Cheesy, but well-meaning. I encourage all youth to “stay alive and free”.
The shelter side of this shelter usually features bizarre fashion advertising. In July, on the flip side of the above poster was this bizarre lady: a white woman seductively holding handcuffs. In addition to promoting “fashion” I guess she was trying to explain that temptations can be crassly grotesque:
To be sure, my neighborhood is dominated by Chinese families. Red is the color you wear on your wedding day.
Meanwhile, over on the BART, I see this strange poster in the distance:
I got up to take a closer look to discover a black man in his underwear, barricading the door against the sodomy we assume accompanies a prostate exam. “If you’re over 50, or an African American over 45, get your prostate exam!”
No comment.
So, yeah, there are some provocative posters, questionable imagery, but look beyond advertising to real folk, and you’ll see some soul.
This week I upgraded the guts in my desktop. For the video card I jumped up to an ASUS EN9600GT silent graphics card. It is pretty “bleeding edge” as far as Linux goes, and it is a double-wide card with a massive heatsink where others would have a fan. I like to reduce the white noise.
Unfortunately, it is too new for the currently-supported Ubuntu drivers. I used Ubuntu’s NvidiaManual docs to manually upgrade to the 173.14.12 drivers from NVidia’s site, and then things were happier. Except video playback. Files and DVDs seem to work okay, but the colors are off, notably, people get rendered with blue or purple flesh. (more…)
This is the first contemporary “doodle” that I’m posting. I hope there will be more. I have long had a crush on the word “iconoclast” which basically means non-conformist, someone who marches to their own drumbeat, conventions be damned. I like it because it kind of sounds like “ironclad”. The “ironclad iconoclast” chugging along the seas blowing up wooden preconceptions!
Yeah, anyway, that crazy guy with the mug is me. Seriously, I can drink coffee from a paper cup if I have to but why should I have to? So, if I’m headed to a cafe I pack my own mug. Of course, Starbucks will still hand me my pastry in a bag, like I’m some sort of cretin.
I don’t actually talk as much as “Mr Iconoclast” but I have smiled and answered “MUG SIZE!”
Also, that overly-wide middle line could be considered a bug, which I could have fixed on the computer, but have chosen to preserve for posterity. Nyah!
