I found to Halley's Comet via Joi's recent post.  Actually, her blog is named "Halley's Comment" but I read it as Halley's Comet because the name reminded me of a little paragraph I wrote recently:

As I streak across the sky called life, I pickup debris that will slow me down or change my direction unless I cast it aside.  My blog is the long tail of a comet called me. – Why I Blog

I am in the middle of reading her "How to Become an Alpha Male" series of posts, recommended by Joi.  Good read.  I think of myself as an Alpha Male of sort so I found her Alpha Male series amusing and reflective.  I don't read much writing by women by choice.  When I do, I am rarely affected by the writing.  I wonder if this is just me or one of nature's mechanism to protect men from women — What dear?  I didn't hear you the first time.  Dorothy Dunnett was an exception.  Looks like Halley Suitt is another exception.

Halley's "Confidence Game" post made me think about my confidence.  I had confidence problem in my youth, but during the course of my "Selfish Pig" self-therapy, I realized that not only one doesn't need to justify having confidence, it is disadvantageous over the long run to support one's confidence with columns of justifications.

Having confidence because of how you look will fade away as you get older or have accidents.  Having confidence because of your intellectual powers lasts longer, but you are limited to the areas of your expertise.  Such confidence also tend to leak arrogance over time.

Examining and experimenting with confidence, I concluded that it is just combined effects of an internally-produced drug and not even limited to humans.  It is special because it affects not only how one performs and is affected by one's surrounding, but also affects nearby animals sensitive to it.  This is not that different from using prescriptions to overcome depression except far cheaper.

Once I chalkmarked it, next step was to figure out how to generate it and keep generating it in a constant flow.  Here is the formula* that worked on me.

• Confidence is like body temperature.
• If I lose it, I will die.
• Just have it.

Whether my conclusion is correct or not matters little for it works and I am too lazy to be scientifically-correct.

* I use the word formula to describe a set of simple sentences expressing a group of thoughts that when taken together have desired effects on one's mind.  Some are stable and persistent, others are not.  If you are gonna build one, do it carefully.  You can easily screw up your mind this way.  Just look at me, for example. <maniacal-grin/>

After twenty hours of AdSense trial, the ads have gotten over 1000 impressions and almost 20 clicks.  Hmm.  Isn't 1.6% clickthrough rate just a little on the high side?  I thought it was around 1%.

My AdSelect idea will probably result in much higher-clickthrough than AdSense, particularly if greater flexibility in layout and personal comment via tooltip is allowed.  I am now thinking about making it happen, maybe co-op style or through a partnership with Google or DoubleClick.

AdSelect can become more of an endorsement network and product quality filter.  Another crazy angle is that it has the potential to turn into an identity/reputation network.  How about this weird piece: You Are What You Recommend?  Reputation network is, in essence, distribution of reputation.  But reputation must radiate from somewhere, meaning you need a starting point.  Interesting thoughts.  Need more thoughts though.

Another thought.  AdSense ads don't appear in RSS feeds because it is just plain irritating when ads follow you around.  If AdSelect thing works out, it might make AdSelect RSS feeds (a channel of just ads for products I endorse) worth subscribing to so people can learn about what new products I like.

These kind of ideas are what I was after when I started my AdSense trial.  Good ideas are linked by dumb ideas.

I just found out that Loudcloud changed its name to Opsware, 11 months behind the news.  Duh.  I still have no idea what the hell they do other than it being Marc Anderseen's company.  On the other hand, I know that Mozilla 1.4 was recently released.  *Yawn*

Hah!  Tim is mad as hell because I claimed my roses are fatter than his.  If he wants Blogging War of Roses, I'll gladly give it to him.  Just look at the size of his rose compared to the leaves.  Not even close, Tim.  Besides, your roses are funky looking.  Your pictures look much better than mine though, particularly that White Astilbe.  I got a tiny 3.2MP, you got a 5MP.  No competition there.  At least mine is cheap enough for me to look unconcerned convincingly when I lose it.

I can get same amount of details as you can by making my flowers bigger.  Just wait until next year when I'll have roses the size of watermelons or maybe even bigger, big enough for me to get a warning from my Nazi home owner association for endangering the safety of the community, big enough to be invited to David Letterman Show, big enough to squash me like a bug.  Oops.  Time for my medicine again.

Just in case, I instructed my son to hang up immediately if any ill-mannered skinny roses call.

SmartBars are just applications that cling to a side of your screen like the way Windows Task Bar does.  I typically use it to quickly access folders and applications instead of navigating the Start Menu.  I found two SmartBars via Scoble, SmartBarXP and Desktop Sidebar, and decided to try the SmartBarXP (looked better than the other one).  Nicely done although it's not quite commercial product quality yet.  It comes with 14 gadgets ranging from MP3 player and system resource monitor.

SmartBarXP's main problem is that it is too big and slow for a program intended to be running all the time.  It eats up 24 to 32 meg of memory and responds slowly when interacting with it.  I thought it might be written with .NET, so I took a look at the binaries and found that it was written in Visual Basic 6.  You can build nice programs with VB, but not when you need minimum impact on memory and CPU.

Google accepted my blog for AdSense so the AdSense trial is on.  I opted to put horizonal ads after the last post of each day.  I appologize if my ad-enabling my blog offends you and I'll understand if you decide to stop visiting during the trial.  BTW, there will be no ads in my RSS feed (unless I made a mistake in my Radio configuration).

Please don't click on the ads for my sake.  I know this is what was happening with the high click-through rate at Tim Bray and Russell Beattie blogs.  Trial means exactly that, a trial, and not a tip cup.  Also, don't forget to send me feedback not just on how it looks or annoys you.  Tell me how it changes your view toward the blog and ideas on how a blog might display ads harmoniously.

Thanks.

Update 1: Well, the learning process continues.  It turns out Google wants only one ad banner per page.  Since a blog home page shows more than one day of posts, I moved the bannder script down up to page level.  The ads haven't shown up yet though and it might be visible only if you are coming from Google.

Update 2: Ads finally showed after an HTML bug was fixed.  Horizontal ad stuckout like a sore thumb no matter where I put it.  So I switched to a vertical one and placed it below the blogroll so it won't appear too intrusively.  Nothing comes up in the stat page though.

Update 3: Obviously, there are some problems with AdSensibility.  I mentioned some Korean baseball players just a few days ago and Google decided that my site should show 3 baseball-related ads out of 4 ads.  Hmm.

I installed Google Toolbar two days ago to see how BlogThis! works.  Not bad for a first cut.  While using it, I noticed the Popup Blocker.  In the past two days, it block 37 popup ads.  Yesterday, I had to override the blocker to access some Comcast popup windows.

IMHO, popup window is a bad design choice.  It is unfortunate that 3D-Secure accepts PIN in a popup window which just opened a can of worms like conflict with popup blockers.  But it was a marketing decision and you know how little leverage engineers have over marketing decisions.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting that Google doesn't do popup ads and its Popup Blocker have the potential to degrade effectiveness of popup ads sold by others.  I am sure Google engineers added this feature with only the Google users' benefit in mind (engineers are incredibly innocent by nature), but I think the effect have the potential to be become significant if Google Toolbar becomes really popular.

Just in case Google-haters misuse this post, I want to make it clear that I like using Google the product and respect Google the company's good intentions.