Posts categorized “Articles”

Hi, Folks, I need your help with something. A momentous anniversary silently slipped by on 31 December 2011, unnoticed by all but me. You see, that date marked…

The 10th Anniversary of my First-Ever Article

Yes, that’s right! On 31 December 2001 I posted my first-ever article here at This is Chris dot com. It was a rather tepid recap of the the logistics of that Christmas, which was the first one after Carrie & I moved in together, but which we didn’t actually end up spending together at all. So old is this article that all of its images are broken and I have no idea where to find them anymore!

In the ten years since then I’ve written 83 more articles. Some years were more productive than others. There was the shameful 2010 where I only managed to scrape out 2 articles, one of which was my ubiquitous, yearly Oscar article.

Now here’s what I need your help with, my dear & loyal readers. I want to write a 10-year anniversary article about my best articles. And since you are my dear & loyal readers, I know that you’ve obviously read ALL of my articles.

So I’d like for you to please leave a comment on this post with what your favorite articles of mine are. On the off chance that you haven’t read all of my articles (laughable, I know), here are some of my personal favorites:

• The Shame of the He-Man Poster
• In-Depth Analysis of Early NES Box Art Trends
• Proper Garage Sale Etiquette
• The Diary of Dr. Kick: Mysterious Stone Archaeologist
• My Infamous Reverse-Time Tube

And of course you should browse my full Articles Archive.

Enjoy, and THANKS IN ADVANCE!

It’s Christmas Eve Eve, everybody! I hope y’all are having a nice holiday season. But if you’re not, it isn’t too late! There’s a simple thing you can do to save Christmas. It’s easy… [read the full article]

A while back I started running some Google Adwords ads on my website. Specifically two types: the tall tower ads and the biggest box ads that they offer, and only in visual format (no text-only ads).

I didn’t do this to make money. I have no illusions on that. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t make more than $5 or $6 a year running ads on thisischris.com. No, I did it as an experiment.

You see, I’ve been learning a lot about the process Google uses to serve ads on websites. They have a very advanced and complicated algorithm that on-the-fly scans a website to get the gist of what it’s about, then selects ads that best match the subject matter of the website and displays whichever ad wins a very complicated bidding war for position and frequency and a whole mess of other factors.

That got me wondering. What “gist” does Google get from thisischris.com? What does Google think my website is about? What is its subject matter?

So I decided to place those two ad options on my website to see what Google’s live algorithm would come up with. For the past 10 days I’ve taken screenshots of the ads that run on the front page of the website and 4 additonal random recent posts. That’s 10 ads a day for 10 days equals 100 ads.

Here they all are, broken down by how many times I saw them. I’ve added commentary to select ads when something struck my fancy about them. [Read the Full Article]

Since you’re on the internets, you’ve probably heard of this “unboxing” thing that’s been happening the past few years. Basically, you film yourself opening the box of some piece of technology (like an iPad2 or Nintendo 3DS) and removing and cataloging all of the pieces in the box. The whole entire process. Yes, it’s ridiculous. Don’t believe me? Just search for unboxing on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=unboxing&aq=0

See? RIDICULOUS. So of course I thought I’d try it…

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AND WATCH THE VIDEO!

Enjoy!

A Thought & Logic Experiment

The last article I wrote was about the vagaries of time travel and the whys and hows as to howcome nobody has ever met a time traveler. Keeping with the theme of time variance, I thought it would be fun for me (and hopefully you) to give a good inquiry into an old thought & logic experiment that I first conceived back in college: Chris Harris’s infamous Reverse-Time Tube. [Read the Full Article]

Time Travel, Roger, & You

I’ve just written a big article about why I believe you’ll never meet a time-traveler… unless you travel through time yourself. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS! [Read the Full Article]

Here’s the proof

2011 was the first year in many years (since “A Beautiful Mind” won Best Picture) that I participated in an Oscar Pool. Everybody puts in some money and fills out a ballot, and whoever gets the most right wins all the money in the pot. It was a lot of fun! [Read the full article]