quizzical.net

I installed Google AdSense just about an hour ago, and jumped on the refresh button, eager to see what insights their world-class algorithm would find in identifying the content of quizzical.net, and matching it with ads. The site loaded, and…

Nothing. The page appeared exactly the same as before. Was the CSS breaking Google’s supplied code? Was the PHP parser removing something? Was Google refusing to serve the ads for some reason? I tried putting the code in different places. Still nothing. After scratching my head for far longer than I should have, it occured to me that perhaps my Adblock Plus list subscription was preventing the ad from rendering. I checked the blockable items list, and appearing in red was “http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/”. I removed the filter rule and tried reloading again.

Finally, an ad box popped up, exactly as I had intended it. There were two ads, and they both linked to quiz sites. An honest mistake. Many a human friend, upon seeing the name of this site, has assumed that it would be a quiz site, perhaps similar in nature to Emode. Upon loading the site, however, any human will recognize that it is not a quiz site but a plain old blog. Google, though, still decided to link to quiz sites. This doesn’t bother me though, as it may end up killing two birds with one stone. In my hypothetical situation, a quiz-hungry quiz maniac stumbles upon quizzical.net while hunting for quizzes. Disappointed to find a mere blog instead, a glimmering AdSense ad in the corner catches his eye. “Quizzes! Pay dirt!,” he says to himself as he exits my site in hot pursuit of his next fix, earning me a nickel in the process. Cha-ching!

Anyway, I reloaded the site a few more times to see what else would come up, and I got stuck on Christian ads (of course, saying both the C-word and the J-word in this post probably isn’t going to help me in this regard). Now why would Google think to serve Christian ads on quizzical.net? Evangelical Christians are in no way my target audience, I don’t mention our Lord and Savior (I think I’m painting myself into a corner here) anywhere on the site, and I’m an atheist. I scour the site, and finally notice that the latest post contains the words “commandment”, “thou shalt”, and “thy”. Really? This is enough to make quizzical.net a Christian site? Now, some in my situation would say, “well, praise the Lord and pass the loot!,” but I had been hoping that these ads would complement the content of my site. Also, I don’t think I’d make much money off of them, as the sort of people I expect to visit quizzical.net might not be the sort seeking to strengthen their personal relationships with Jesus.

Well, maybe the Christian ads will disappear after a few unrelated posts. Or maybe evangelicals will dig my site. Time will tell.

Do not provide any service to any computer system (PC, website, PDA, whatever) that does not have a current backup. It doesn’t matter how simple or safe the operation is; anything in a computer can go wrong at any time, by pure chance, and if you happen to be working on the computer at the time, YOU will be blamed. Seriously, it does not matter how much they beg or threaten, or what your relationship with the person is; Murphy’s law doesn’t care. Oh, and undelete programs are snake oil. At best, they do nothing. At worst, they will overwrite any non-corrupt data with “recovered data” i.e., random bit strings.

That being said, encourage others to back up their data weekly, so that they may benefit from your technical aptitude when they are in need of it. Data loss can strike at any time, even when a system is off-line and unplugged and packed in Styrofoam and sealed in a vault and…

Also, when you work on a document, e-mail it to yourself. That way, when you have a night of flowing, creative stupidity, you can throw it away the next day and have something reasonable to work with.

Anyone want to guess how I spent my evening?

Being interesting, in writing for instance, is a skill that must be practiced like any other, primarily by spending a lot of time being uninteresting while figuring out what appeals to people. I know this, and have repeated it to myself many times since I figured it out about a year ago (yeah, I’m a late bloomer), and yet I refuse to post to my blog (excepting today) unless I think that what I post will somehow change the world. Periodical writing can indeed change the world, but such writing tends to come from extensively-practiced professionals, and even then the phenomenon is quite rare. I have even set goals for myself in the past to write to quizzical.net every day; but when the time comes to do it, I note that I don’t have anything interesting to say and I move on to other things.

The problem with such thinking, of course, is that I will never learn to harvest the interesting thoughts that come to me from time to time if I do not first learn to harvest thoughts in general. And surely, even with my lack of experience in writing, I can still be more interesting than some random person’s cat blog.

So if you’re reading this, it’s most likely because quizzical.net has become wildly popular as a result of my daily writing practice and you’ve decided to go digging through the archives. As you examine the shoddy quality of this article, remember: everyone starts modestly.

I decided to add support for asides, for when I have a cool thought that I don’t feel like expanding into a full-blown post. You can read more about asides on Photo Matt’s blog.

When I first started quizzical.net, my main purpose was to play with web languages, design things, and maybe share a bit of myself with the world. When I brought it back from oblivion a month ago, I intended to use it as the outlet for all these cool ideas flying around in my head (when I share them in conversation, my own excitement makes me blind to other people’s boredom). The reason I brought it back when I did is because I recently graduated from college, where college tends to stifle independent thought and enterprise, at least in my case.

Anyway, this intended purpose as a thought-outlet hasn’t been going as well as I’d hoped so far, mostly due to my being terribly self-conscious in expressing my ideas in public, particularly in a format as permanent as written text. A recent example in Virginia politics comes to mind, in which a 60-year old James Webb is taken to task for an article he wrote at 33, and trying to explain to everyone, “I was just a stupid kid!”

So while I believe that a little self-censorship can be a healthy thing, I have the opposite problem of finding it difficult to post a single word on the Internet. The reason I keep doing it is because I believe that if I force myself through it enough times, it will become comfortable habit.

For the keyword “quizzical”, my site now comes up fifth in Google (mostly because they finally updated their index a month after it came back on-line). Above me are the definition of quizzical (albeit not a very good one — try m-w), an atrociously-designed Australian blog (but it has me beat in content), an English ISP (gee, I guess WordPress is popular), and a cyber-squatter (not linking to it on a matter of principle. If you’re really that interested, go look it up).

I’m not normally such a parenthesis-whore, it’s just that blogging (still hate that term) seems to bring it out in me.

The work on quizzical.net continues, and I’ve added a basic forum to the site. You can get to it by clicking the “Forums” tag at the top of the screen. There are a number of bugs, but I’ll need to brush up on my PHP before I can fix them. The basic functions all work, though, so you can post and reply and whatnot. Also, it is a little ugly. I’ll get around to messing with the CSS too, but I prefer to work on the broken parts first.

That’ll show you. Seriously, though, I feel a little saner when I’m not screaming at the darkness.

Anyway, if you were here a week ago, you notice that I’ve now added a random quote to the top left of the page, right under the “QUIZZICAL.NET”. And this isn’t some infinite, generic collection, mind you. It is a set of hand-picked quotes (about 100 so far) that resonate with me based on my life’s experience and whatnot. I guess the ultimate goal is that people will gain some sort of indescribable sense of what my brain is.

Other than that, I’ve been making minor tweaks here and there, which you probably wouldn’t notice unless you visit often and pat close attention. Quizzical.net is actually pretty close to the way I want it (save for the lack of visitors), but at some point you can expect some renovation of the sidebar.

Well, it’s been 2 years, one month and a week since I last made any changes to this site (though I’ve been working on it for 2 weeks prior to this post). In that time, quizzical.net has had its domain name subscription lapse, been attacked by Turkish children with scripts, been stroked in a most uncomfortable manner by spam bots, and not been viewed by a single human being (as far as I can tell).

Upon my return to quizzical.net, I decided that PHPBB2 (and forums in general) did not serve my vision of what quizzical.net is to become. I thought about it for a while, and decided that a blog (how I hate that word) was the closest format to what I wanted to do. I may or may not depart from this blog (grr) foundation depending on how much it limits me.

WordPress looked pretty barren when I installed it, so I’ve hand-copied all the posts of substance from the old forum-based quizzical.net. Enjoy.

Okay, so I’ve had the domain name Quizzical.net registered for a lot longer than 100 days, but this is the hundredth day of its current, PHPBB-based incarnation.

You’ll notice first that the colors have improved to more aesthetic tones. They’re still a little too high-contrast, and I still need to change most of the forum graphics, and work out a few bugs. However, I just moved out of college, and have two rooms of stuff in my bedroom, and I need to make it fit. Bear with me, I hope to show you some major improvements before June.

Also, be sure to check out my first philosophy article on Quizzical.net.

John