I am, or at least was a Google AdSense particpant. If you didn’t know, AdSense is a program wherein you place some code in your website that allows Google to serve up ads that relate to your content. You need a fair amount of traffic (much more than I get at this point) to make it worthwhile, but I still do it on some sites because it costs nothing to set up and ends up being a surprise $100 every three years or so.

I received this very cryptic email from them this morning:

Dear Publisher,

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

We’re focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new products and features. We’re also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.

Sincerely,

Kim Scott
Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations

I don’t know about you, but that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Even the parts I understood left me wondering what on earth compelled them to tell me this. Contrary to popular belief, I’m no expert on the mind of Google. Fortunately, though, I know someone who is. My friend Tony is a grizzled veteran of the search industry. I sent him the above email and he provided the following translation:

Dear Sir:

Holy fuck, a lot of banks have gone out of business lately!

You’re probably wondering how the fuck we (or anyone you know) can help you make more money.

We might give you the ability to publish more ads… or to improve the targeting and tracking of the ads you already run.

We’re also helping other people spend what little money they have left.

So please, please let us keep making money off… er… FOR you. Yeah.

Sincerely,

Partition 48B-33849

Google Hive Mind

So…um…thanks?

Human beings love to name things. We kind of have to, really, unless we want to continually refer to them generically as “doodad” or “the thing on my foot” or “that guy right there”. It’s much easier to use words like “phone” and “cinder block” and “Steve”. Names are really just a natural result of how we use language. If you want to talk about something specific, you give it a name.

Where names get interesting is when they refer to geography. While most English-speaking modern humans agree that the land mass I’m sitting on right now is called “North America”, I’m pretty sure that’s not what the Cherokee called it. It’s also called something different in Spanish and French. This is all to say that naming geographic entities  is a completely subjective process. You’re going to refer to something in a way that means something to you. It’s kind of unfair to ask you to refer to a continent you don’t live on by the same name as the people living there do.

Where naming really gets absurd, though, is when we apply it to astronomy. There is no way that the beings inhabiting the moons of Epsilon Tauri B call Epsilon Tauri B “Epsilon Tauri B”. They also don’t refer to their sun as “Epsilon Tauri”. Hell, they probably don’t even know they’re in the constellation of Taurus. From where they’re sitting, they certainly can’t tell they’re in a pattern of stars that look like a bull. To us. From here.

What’s interesting to me, though, is what they call us. It sure as hell isn’t “earth” which orbits “the sun”. (I’ve heard our sun referred to as Sol, but I think that’s strictly an Earth term.) To them, we’re on an insignificant planet orbiting an insignificant star that’s in a constellation that we can’t see because we’re in it. Maybe they refer to us as “Insignifica C”. Perhaps it’s something totally generic, like “393789340343118″ (using whatever number system they use, of course). Maybe they have a naming convention similar to ours and they call us something like “Beta Oonat 3″ because we’re the third planet orbiting the second brightest start in the constellation Oonat. (What’s an Oonat? No idea. We’re in a constellation that’s a dead ringer for one, though. ) It could be something more ominous, like “Target 4861″. Maybe, though, just maybe, they know a lot more about us than we think. Maybe they know more about us than we know about ourselves. What if they’re the ones seeded life on earth four billion years ago? (You didn’t know about that one, did you?) In that case, we’re probably known as something like “Experiment #46″.

You know, if we are an experiment being performed by vastly superior race, I’m sure they’re listening to our broadcasts much like we’re trying to listen to theirs. I can hear them now:

“Oer-Neg, come look at this.”
“What is it, Gron-Fube?”
“Transmission from Experiment #46. Something they call “American Idol”.”
“Barna gorframs! We should probably terminate that one before they can leave the planet and infect anything else!”
“Okay. Any chance we can wait until the season is over?”

Until a few months ago, we were a car-free family. We were belligerently car-free. The kind of car-free where you hug trees and use the car-share program and take mass transit and tell everyone about your belligerent car-freedom and ask them what it feels like to kill polar bears every time they go to the store. The kind of car-free where people stop inviting you to social gatherings because they are sick of hearing about your belligerent car-freedom.

Well, that’s what I thought, at least. As it turns out, it was just me that was all about car-freedom. My lovely wife had been, for most of the car-free process, kind of annoyed that we didn’t own a car. I won’t say there weren’t signs, but I chose to ignore them. I mean, when one can achieve the epic levels of smugness that are possible without owning a car, you don’t just toss that away lightly.

When we discussed it, at length, I pointed out all the reasons we didn’t need a car and how we could use the car share and mass transit and not kill polar bears or be dependent on foreign oil…and it really didn’t matter. You can’t take the dog in the zipcar if he’s not in a crate. Company policy. This means you can’t take the dog hiking. I mean, you could, but what fun is crating your dog for an hour so you can go hiking? I made her say it out loud: “I want to buy a car for the dog.”

I resisted for a while, but after a particularly frustrating day with the car-share combined with the fact that I had started working out of a new office that wasn’t super mass-transit friendly, it became obvious that Keri was right and that we needed a car.  She wanted to get an 80s-era Volvo, which I flatly refused to agree to. I agreed to a car on the condition that I would get to pick out said car.

I have always thought it would be cool to have an 80s-era diesel Mercedes that I could convert to run on waste vegetable oil. Lovecraft Biofuels is right here in town, so I wouldn’t even have to mess with doing it myself. A few hours of sifting through Craigslist postings and I found the “perfect car”. It was a 1975 Mercedes 240D. The best part was, the veggie oil conversion was already done! I fell in love with it on sight and purchased it for $4K a day or two later.

It was making a funny sound that I was sure was a belt slipping, so I took it to the fine folks at MBI motors, a reputable local Mercedes mechanic. As it turns out, this car had all kinds of problems. It was in the shop for two weeks. $1800 later, I got it back.  Granted, that sucked, but whatever. I now had my cool old Mercedes that ran on veggie oil. It would take me a bit longer for it to pay for itself in free fuel, but whatever. I just loved this car.

We took a much needed mini-vacation to the Oregon Coast. The weather was perfect, the car was running like a top and the $5800 I had into this car seemed totally worth it. Everything was great. That is until the following Monday morning.

I got in the car, started it up and I knew something was very wrong. It didn’t sound right. It kept stalling out while in motion, which, let me tell you, is more than a little scary. I limped about halfway back to MBI and the car just stopped, making a sound not unlike a bucket of wrenches being poured into a wood chipper. I had it towed the rest of the way. An hour or two after I dropped it off, I got a call confirming my worst fear: the car was totally dead. Asked what was wrong, the mechanic somberly informed me that he “could look at it and try to figure out what happened, but at this point, it’s an autopsy.” I was crushed. I know it was just a car, but I felt like someone just killed a close friend. At that point, I was out $5800 and a car. The mechanic informed me it was worth about $500 for scrap.

I was sorely disappointed by all this, but I was not willing to give up on the idea of the veggie oil powered diesel Mercedes. This time, however, would be different. I was going to look at no less than five different cars. I was going to find an automatic. I wasn’t getting anything older than 1980. I wasn’t getting anything with more than 250K miles on it. After about two weeks of combing craisgslist and zipcarring to various parts of Portland and Vancouver to look at cars, I found it: a 1981 300D automatic with 240K miles on it. It was well taken care of, the body was in great shape (and totally coincidentally, the same color as the deceased ‘75) and it was an automatic. It started up instantly, sounded great and didn’t leak oil or smoke or anything. It had power windows, a power sun roof, power locks…everything. The best part was that the guy was asking $2800 for the car.  My only regret about this vehicle was that I hadn’t found before I bought the ‘75.

The power locks in that model year used a vacuum pressure system that was essentially in “series” (or whatever you call a “circuit” of vaccum tubing). A bad seal made it so you couldn’t lock the doors. No problem, I’d just get that fixed. I made an appointment to take it in on Friday. I left it parked on the street. Thursday night, f@#king tweakers stole the after-market stereo out of it. To add insult to injury, it was one of those stereos with a removable face-plate. The kind you can take off and take with you so the stereo is useless. I had left it attached.

Fortunately, it turns out that getting a new car stereo isn’t difficult or expensive. I went to Car Toys and they had a new one (complete with 1/8″ mp3 player jack) installed $160 and 45 minutes later.

A quick trip through the shop to fix the power locks and do a front-end alignment it was square business. I  haven’t done the SVO conversion yet (a $900 affair) but I will soon. The paint was a little oxidized, but it had very few scratches and dents. A little Scratch-X and a couple of coats of wax and it was shining like a new penny.

So at the end of it all, I will have spent $9000 on old Mercedes. I think that works out to around four 80s-era Volvos. I realize that I am a dumbass for buying that first car, but whatever. Live and learn, I guess. With the amount I drive, it will have paid for itself in free fuel in approximately six years. I still think that’s better than the break-even on a Prius.

Just to tempt fate, next weekend, I’m going to drive to Salt Lake City for a client meeting. Wish me luck.