Google Adsense…

Lately I have been doing a lot of reading, researching, and even a little experimenting with a certain Google product/service called Google Adsense.

For those of you who’ve never heard of it, it is essentially an advertising program and combined with it’s other half, adwords, and Google’s ever popular search engine, they form the perfect TRIFECTA. It is, in my humble opinion, the perfect business model and absolutely ingenious.

To try an explain in pure layman’s terms would be very tedious so I will craft a fictional scenario that will paint a picture for you of the TRIFECTA! Here goes:

Austin, is a web publisher, he runs a website for the purpose of spreading a message that he cares deeply about, say, the preservation of the American comic book as part of American culture. He pays for a server and hosts his files and images and writes articles and updates his page. He has a following of people who agree wholeheartedly with his cause, as well as thousands of people who stumble upon the site from searching for words like Comics, or Marvel or DC. Unfornately, however, Austin is running out of money and as much as he cares for the topic, he cant afford the server costs of xx a month.

Jerry, is an avid comic book collector who owns his own comic store in Florida. He does pretty well there and he’s got a good base of customers. However, he’s a business man at heart and he knows he’s not going to get rich doing this, and all the overhead of inventory and fluctuating demand on comic books is often leaving him with excess inventory of comics and other collectibles. He wants to sell it all so he can expand his store and maybe even start a chain.

Google, is a multi-billion dollar company that runs one of the highest volume (traffic volume that is) search engines in the world. And in case you didn’t notice, search engines are what everyone uses to navigate the madness we call the internet.

And FINALLY You, are just a person, browsing the web, looking for stuff that interests you and in this case you are one of the millions of people that like comics.

Lets see how it goes down.

Austin and Jerry, through Googles efforts in marketing both hear about Adsense and adwords respectively. Austin, a web publisher goes with adsense since he has a website that gets traffic. Jerry goes with adwords since he wants to start a website to sell his excess inventory and such but has no experience with online marketing and has no idea on how to get traffic to his site. How can he sell if no one knows about his page?

Moments pass… Jerry now has a rudimentary website up and running and has bought the following keywords though adwords, comics, Marvel, DC, Spider-Man, wolverine, and other such keywords.  Austin, whos website is already getting traffic for people searching those terms will place adsense ads on his webpage. This means that austins webpage now has advertisements on it. Not annoying flashy ones you see in places like myspace and such though. They are just plain text, they are informative and they fit in with the rest of the site. All done.

Now whenever people search for any of those keywords, marvel, dc, comics, wolverine, spider-man, they will get austin’s page, and upon going in there see Jerry’s ads, and maybe if they are interested, click on it, jerry pays google XX cents for each visitor this way and google pays austin xx-x cents for each person austins page sends to jerrys page. With thousands of visitors austins making hundreds of dollars, googles making a few bucks (but hey they’ve got millions of people making a few bucks for them), and jerry’s paying hundreds of dollars; but selling thousands of comics!

It sure sounds like everyone benefits huh? Yes its true, they all do. All three of them, or should I say, all TRI of them.

Thank you.

My 21 Run

What an amazing night… where do I start and where do I end? It’s hard to say but I’ll try.

I started the day off with an AMMAAAZZING meal with my buddies Kevin Tako and Tyler and my love, Vy, at Todai where I ate for free and ordered my first beer. Asahi tallboy. Nice lil Japanese beer. Todai is freaking awesome. Coming out of the restaurant we saw this cute korean couple downstairs in the mall (we were at pacific place in the top floor) get engaged as the guy put up this HUGE sign and asked her to marry him. It was pretty cool, we ran down (actually slowly lowered down through the elevator) to take a look at them to see if they were good looking or not. Yes they were.

ANYWAYS!!

We went back to the fraternity and just hung out for a while until it was almost dinner time. People started showing up and so after we had a good crowd of like 10 people, we headed down to Buca Di Beppos in downtown Seattle, close to the Space Needle. By the time we arrived there was already about 15 people there waiting, I’ll try to name them ALL!

1. Austin (me)
2. Vy
3. Tako
4. Kevin O
5. Tyler Stone
6. Morgan H
7. Jin
8. Tin
9. Michelle
10. Cheryl
11. Jason Church
12. Mike S.
13. Jenny Choi
14. Mary Wang
15. Alisha Wang
16. Sandra Wu
17. Jason Chuang
18. Kellen
19. Andrew Yang
20. Daniel De Los Palos
21. Jared Chu
22. Elitza
23. Nick
24. Ely Ess

Dinner was freaking awesome. We all ordered pasta and pizzas family style and all shared together. I was given about 5 drinks at the place before we left for UW and continued our drinkfest.

I started the Ave Crawl at the irish emmigrant and ended at earls. My crawl consisted of 2 bars… LOL.. And as for the question I know you all have in your head (in case you werent there anyway): Did Austin make it to 21 Drinks on his 21st birthday? The answer is no. I didn’t. I did however make it to 17. 19 if you include my lunch beers but I don’t. I’ll try to name them all. Correct me via a comment if i missed any people above or any drinks below.

1. Shot of Yaeger
2. Shot of Yaeger
3. Washington Apple
4. Cement Mixer
5. Chocolate Cake
6. Shot of Crown Royale
7. Pabst Blue Ribbon
8. Liquid Cocaine
9. Blowjob
10. Jaeger Bomb
11. Irish Car bomb
12. Whisky on the Rocks
13. Shot of Whiskey
14. !!MYSTERY!!
15. Wild Turkey
16. Irish Car bomb
17. Irish Car bomb into a full Beer

Overall, i had a great time and though I did get WAY too drunk, appreciate everyone taking care of me (especially Vy and Lorenzo) and spending that saturday evening with me. It was both unforgettable and VERY forgettable. As always, I am the ultimate paradox. LOL

Pictures to come soon

11 Guys signed and still going strong!

Wow. I dont know when I can imagine myself saying that we, at Washington Alpha Phi Delta Theta, have signed 11 guys for the coming fall quarter. It makes me extremely excited because its going to be a shit load of fun.  If any of you pledges are reading this, then now you know how excited I am to have your company in the house!!!!!!

What’s New with Tech I care about!

I read a ton of tech blogs and articles on this sort of stuff so there is a ton of raw info that goes through my eyes, my brain and eventually out of me from either my mouth or poop. Every so often, in the crazy mist of information that is available there is something that really sticks out, at which point I feel very inclined to go out and share those bits of info to the world and to my friends who may also be interested but not interested in spending all day on the computer reading blogs like a straight up nerd!!!Anyways, its no mystery to anyone that I am a big lover of Google as well as Microsoft and their Xbox 360. Here goes!

What is new with Google? Well, a big thing thats been going on lately is the deal that they’ve struck with mySpace. To be slightly more specific, they have struck an advertising deal with Myspace. Now, for those of you who dont know, MySpace is one of the world’s biggest giants in terms of web traffic. In fact there is not a single doubt that they are in the top 5 and at some points have even been number 1 in terms of most visits per day/week/month, whatever. However, for any use who’s ever used myspace, you probably know that it is burdened with the same trouble that comes from a site that seemed to grow too fast. Updating your myspace code or changing your layout is an enormous mess of CSS and HTML that even experienced coders can have a ton of trouble with. As a result they have some trouble reaching their full earning potential through advertising because of the unstable, unorganized and sometimes plain difficult to use nature of myspace. Google has just sign a 900,000,000 thats Nine hundred million dollar advertising campaign with Myspace so now you can expect to find Google text and banner ads on myspace instead of those %^&*&^% games and flashy bs thats currently on myspace. Who knows, maybe this can turn into something more long term and google can help myspace become a better internet service.

Microsoft Xbox 360

Microsoft has come out with a free developers kit so individual people all over the entire world can create their own microsoft windows capable xbox 360 and windows games! What is the signifance of this? Well, if you have ever played the game Geometry wars or any of the other excellent (most of the time) games on Xbox Live arcade, and have done a little reading on this strange phenomena, then you know where this heading. For those of you who are in the dark. Please! Let me fill you in. With the advent of the next generation consoles coupled with the ever rising rate of piracy in the world, many large game developers have discovered that creating games is a huge risk. Gone are the days where one can create any kind of fun game and have it sell hundreds and thousands and make millions. Now are the days where million dollar budgets, hollywood voice actors, blockbuster movie are “required” in the name of gaming. Halos, and grand theft autos, metal gear solids, marios are practicaly a prerequisite in the title for a game to be successful. Millions are spent on testing and marketing and in a lot of cases, that may not even be enough. the player experience has changed too a major time investment is required for many games nowadays. The storylines are so thick and the plot twists are plentiful. For the producers, the sound effects and the textures need to be spot on, everything can be perfect and a voice actor can destroy the feel of a game, perfection practically needs to be achieved with console games because you can’t exactly release patches all the time either. The point is money is flowing fast and piracy is not helping. Game producers are finding it way too expensive to make games and put all their eggs in a basket. Now they are diversifying. Have a few programmers work on some simple games like geometry wars and mini games or even old arcade classics. Sell them through xbox live arcade at practically no risk and zero risk of piracy! What does this mean? Players can invest less time to get a fun experience while still playing a next gen console, producers can create cool, quirky, zany games at little risk and potentially a great return. Retro games make a comeback. All is well. Dont believe it? Well dont be stupid. Sony and Nintendo have already released news that suggests they are going to offer pretty much the same thing that microsoft is. Nintendo has thousands of games under its belt it could bring back and sony, well theyll figure something out. And now everyday people can create games too! Who can blame sony and nintendo for copying microsoft on this note? Shoot, microsoft is always playing the copy and improve game anyway! Cheers to whoever can do it better and may the consumer always come out the winner.

More in Microsoft Land: Vista

I got ahold of a beta copy of Vista and I installed it on my sisters computer. I gotta say that I am damn impressed with how well it works and everything. Motherboard drivers are instantly and easily installable post OS installation using the internet. Everything feels really automated and yet not to the level where you feel like they are babying you. Also, all the new “aero” effects are totally kick ass. I think its definitely got a really polished feel to it in terms of user experience. It’s really hard to put an exact finger on what it is that makes me feel different as a user but suffice it to say that I feel “smooth” using the new interface with the cool minimizing and the cool new alt tab and the cool new window 3d thing. IE 7 is something I’m pretty impressed with too. I can’t say that i’ve spent a terribly long amount of time using it or anything like that but it feels like they cut out a lot of the random buttons and other crap that used to litter the IE window. Also I didnt run for a firefox installation within the first 20 minutes of using the new IE which is also saying something! Great job MS. I can’t wait to use the final version! Ultimate of course

Rhapsody:

What’s new and exciting here? Well, what isn’t? Rhapsody, for those of you who dont know, is a sweet music service that for people who tend to buy over a handful of songs a month is a very worthy investment. For the price of under a CD or 10 ish tracks on itunes, anyone can have full access to over a million songs that they can burn or throw on their ipods or whatever. All the songs are “added” to your library but don’t actually take up any space on your computer. Get with the times people. Over 50 % of America is now on broadband. Isn’t it about time we stop using up all our precious storage space for thousands of cluttered files that we download from all but the sketchiest depths of the internet? The answer is yes. Yes it is time. Time for Rhapsody! Basically, you stream songs from the internet, and due to their small size, its possible to stream them at very high quality while not at all affecting your browsing speed or anything. What’s cool about Rhapsody is also that they have a really active developer community it seems. A lot of companies are often making little modules or mashups that take advantage of their cool system of music distribution. Theres a couple google desktop ones. Theres some MS space ones. Theres myspace ones…. Theres just a lot of cool stuff that you can do with Rhapsody and their dedication to RSS feeds. One of my favorite ones is the dedicate a song thing. You can dedicate a song to anyone with an email address and when they open their email and click on the link they get taken to the Rhapsody page where it plays them the song that you chose right through this mini browser player. Its tight.

Anyways, thats about it for these technological babbles . Until next time buddies.

My Birthday Dinner with my family

Last night my mom took my, and my whole immediate family out to dinner at Teatro Zinzanni. It was an absolutely awesome time. I don’t want to spoil anything for anybody that may want to go but for a special occasion like an anniversary or a birthday or something for someone special this is definitely a great place to take them.

In a nutshell Teatro Zinzanni is a Magic show, an acrobatics show, a circus, and a musical show all in one fantastic three hour program. The food is amazing and plentiful served over the course of the entire show as well as being incorporated into some of the skits. The servers are all in on it too as in they go around and dance and stuff while they serve you the food. The performers, unlike at a usual circus, will go around to each indivudual table at some point during the night and do fun stuff as well. The acrobatics is amazing,  the magic show is performed by a guy named Voronin

who looks like he was born to be a magician. His tricks are all very orignal and goofy. The entire show has a great sense of humor and you’ll find yourself laughing as many time as you are amazed by the talented cast.

The price I’ll admit is a bit steep but well worth it if you are in the right crowd of loved ones to share the evening with.
http://www.zinzanni.org/

Attempt at a Youtube Post!

A little Trailer for Dead Rising!

This game comes out in like three days. I downloaded the demo on Live Marketplace and it sure is neat. Check it out!

Music Ive been Listening to:

Hey there again everyone!

I just wanted to go through my recent song list, which you can see =========> right there on the side and do an individual review on each song, the artist.. blah blah you know give the music a little love. =P For starters the list to the right of my most recently played songs is ACTUALLY a list of my most recently played songs. If I listen to a song right now, it automatically gets added to that list and updated live everywhere on the Internet where I’ve used that feed (this is the only place.) without any sort of coding or anything on my part. So by the time you read this that list may be different!

Oh SHOOT! Out of the last 10 Songs I’ve listened to, 9 are all by the same artist! Oh no! Oh well, I promised what I promised, lets get started.

The Seed 2.0 by The Roots

This song was referred to me by the lovely Vy Duong. I’ve never heard any of the other songs by this artist before (at least I don’t think…) but I am impressed. For rap, I consider it very difficult to come up with innovative new beats and such that have not been totally overused (for instance After in da club every artist started using the orchestra thing in at least one song) but this song genuinely has a really sweet beat. It make you kinda just wanna dance some cool dance that an Asian such as myself could never be capable of. Seriously though, great beat, great chorus and pretty cool lyrics. Plus when I listen to this song, it reminds me of Vy doing her little finger dance which is always a good thing and cheers me up a bunch even if I’m already ecstatic! Wunderbar if you ask me, straight up wunderbar. Anyway, click on the link above to listen in on the Roots!

Phrenology

The Roots

For the next group, since I listened to practically one of their entire albums, I’ll just combine all the songs into one “review”. The City of Prague Philharmonic. Particularly big movie box set. To give a little bit of a back-story before I delve into this awesomeness: Pablo and I were working at his place on Alki…we’re talking about how much we both like Pirates of the Caribbean the first one (i haven’t seen the second yet so its not like i dislike it) and how much we particularly love the music of that movie. How it actually makes you wanna like jump around with a sword, maybe punch some sailors, get thrown in jail, slit some throats, that sort of thing!

So i decided to look up the song on Rhapsody to stream some of the music and I stumbled upon this wonderful collection. The City of Prague Philharmonic basically “redoes” pretty much ALL the great movie/TV show/whatever songs that we all know and love. This particular album I was listening to specifically focuses on classics starting from movies such as gone with the wind all the way to recent masterpieces such as harry potter and pirates and of course everything in between. They also have box sets focusing on different themes and such for instance an entire album dedicated to TV Show Theme Songs or All the Superhero Movies music or even something generic like the box set for “Epics” like Ben hur and what not.

One of the best things about this group is this : you know how you watch a movie like pirates for instance and theres all those parts where you’re like I like this music now, and this and this, and this, but to listen to the actual OST would be like an hour or something? For instance when he’s running away from the British sailors in the beginning to the part when Elizabeth is on the Pirate ship and sees them all as skeletons for the first time or when they are doing the underwater march, all of those pieces are great. City of Prague Philharmonics helps us out! They combine all those songs into one extended 7-8 minute song so it honestly is like watching the whole movie in your head!!!!!!!!!!!!! Insane in the membrane right? Seriously.

The Incredible Film Music Box
City of Prague Philharmonic

So if you like what you’ve read here, head over to Rhapsody.com, get a free trial (no spyware or malware included) and listen to 25 perfect quality streams for free! Honestly Harry.

Now Listening to: Pirates of the Caribbean by City of Prague Philharmonic

The MARVEL Civil War?

Last Tuesday, I decided not to go straight home after work and decided instead to stop by the local comic book store at the UW. Zanadu Comics. I kindly informed the store owner that I had been out of touch with comics for a long time and that I’d like to get back into a few storylines, if there were any good ones that weren’t too far developed yet. He noted my X-men Tshirt and proceeded to recommend me a new Universe wide story arc in the Marvel Universe known as, the Civil War.

For those of you who don’t know me, I love comics. For those of you who do know me, you probably know I love comics. Particularly the Marvel Universe and specifically the X-men and Spider Man. My favorite characters are Wolverine (typical), spidey, Colossus, Juggernaut and pretty much everyone else. Some of my favorite baddies are Dr. Doom and Magneto.

Anyways, getting back to business: The Civil War begins when congress (the fictional version of course) passes a law in response to a severe disaster that happened after a group of rookie heroes, hoping to boost the ratings of their own reality TV show. Several hundred people were killed in an enormous explosion, including over 200 children (elementary school nearby). Congress passes a law that says all superhumans (people with powers or abilities beyond the average person [includes punisher and daredevils]) must register as agents of the government. they would have to make known their secret identities, become subject to government provided training, but most importantly, operate as one united front of heroes. This obviously doesnt sount too bad, what what if you take into account some of the rivalries amongst the heroes? Some of the hatreds? Wolverine is a murderer. Several other heroes are former Villans. Hell even spider-man has never been the jewel of the public eye. What if their identities are public and their family members become targets of the “bad guys”?

 

Essentially, the Marvel Universe becomes split in two. Half for this new law, and half against it. Captain America goes AWOL and leads the resistance while Iron Man leads the effort of uniting the heroes. Not only are the heroes split, but so are the bad guys and so is each individual team. Former friends are now enemies, former enemies as you might guess are now working together for freedom or for security.
The story is very compelling and though I have only read the first 2 issues ( of 7) I am already hooked. This has the promise to be like House of M in the size of it’s scope and I’m very excited to read the rest. I know, even as an off an on comic book reader, that Marvel does do this sort of thing a little bit too often where they shake the whole universe to the core and whatnot, but you know, honestly I enjoy every moment of it. House of M was absolutely brilliant. The artwork and the writing is always top notch and I know I’ll be a Marvel fan for the rest of my life probably! Its absolutely crazy!!!!!!!!

Anyways, if you are a comic fan and like me have been out of touch with comics for a while, Civil War is definitely the perfect series for you to go ahead and “hop on” as it is still early in the series, it probably is collectible, the artwork and writing is stunning and compelling and the all our favorite heroes are featured!!!!! Have a great day.