I have had an innate fascination with Google Adsense and the correct spelling of monetization for a while. Countless times, I was poised to hit the ‘Unsubscribe’ button while hovering over John Chow’s blog. But every single time, I stopped myself. Is this guy for real ? Is he really making thousands of dollars every months from blogging ? Does he really eat in those posh restaurants ? This decision to place banner ads and a sponsored search box on this site was not taken lightly and sincere apologies to all my principled, minimalist, long-standing, traditionalist readers. ...

WordPress versus Blogger versus TypePad (according to Google Trends). Note the slight skew for news items about Blogger.

On 3 May 2007, a four year old toddler (not girl), Madeleine McCann, was abducted from her hotel room in Praia Da Luz, Portugal while her parents enjoyed a well-deserved pizza and a glass of wine in a nearby restaurant. Since then the parents have launched a concerted and impressive campaign to keep Madeleine’s name in the media spotlight. The distraught mother is carrying Madeleine’s grubby, pink cuddly cat everywhere she goes. ...

I don’t know what I did wrong but I just upgraded to WordPress 2.2 and everything still works. Download WordPress 2.2 distribution and read instructions. Upload tar archive to Bluehost using pscp. Run manual database backup using AutoMySQLBackup. Deactivate all plugins. $ cp -rv blog blog-213 $ rm -fr blog $ tar zxvf ~/wordpress-2.2.tar.gz $ mv wordpress blog Overlay contents of original wp-content/plugins and wp-content/themes directories. Reactivate all plugins (apart from widgets) which is now in core. Check version number (2.2) from dashboard. Manually delete 143 spam comments that appeared during the 4 minutes Akismet’s shields were down. Admire new full screen WYSIWYG preview post.

…lies in your hands, dear reader. Another baby when my wife is 57 years old ? - discuss. My job title when I joined Siebel in April 2003 was ‘Junior Architecture Specialist’. Four years later, it transpires that I am now officially entitled to call myself ‘Principal Architecture Specialist’. However, I have elected not to change my business cards and .signature as I am simply not worthy. Please remember that I have worked with some very talented individuals (past and present). ...