What a difference

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I've been looking at the ads I've been getting on Facebook lately. It's almost humorous...the difference between the targeted flyers and ads, and the crummy banners sold by MSN. Over the past couple days I found myself clicking on ads for Cloverfield (which I'm dying to see) and for a Star Trek ringtone. (Holy crap. I can't believe I'm clicking on banner ads.) Both were ads obviously targeted at me via interest, based on my profile data. Today, I got a banner ad advertising some sort of diabetes site. When I clicked on the ad, I was taken to a pharmaceutical company site and asked to provide information on what I use to treat my diabetes. I don't have the disease. I hopefully never will. So what, was a planning agency stupid enough to run a pharma ad in an ROS capacity across Facebook without targeting it?

Whatever the case, I find display ads of no interest to me, and flyer/news feed ads that are incredibly relevant. Facebook is doing a great job of targeting advertising. Their buddies at MSN? Not so much.

Political E-mail Stepping Up

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I get e-mail from both the Republicans and the Democrats. The Republicans think I'm still a Republican. And the Democrats seem to think I'm a guy who will write them checks regularly. I usually get something from the Republicans 2-3 times a month. The Democrats would send something 3-4 times a week, until they hit primary season. Now, the e-mails are coming several times a day. At some point, John Edwards must've gotten his mitts on the DCCC e-mail list. His campaign e-mails me at least once a day looking for donations. The DCCC e-mails at least once a day, also looking for donations. They keep it fresh by having different politicians, analysts, campaign strategists and Democratic Party superstars write the e-mails.

But they all say essentially the same thing - Thanks for donating in the past. Please donate more.

Lately, I see Cloudmark has been filtering Edwards to the trash. I'm guessing that a P2P network that is presumably divided in its political leanings will probably ID most of the political e-mails as spam, since Republicans will hit the "Block" button when they see communications from the Democrats and vice versa. Shouldn't be long now before all of them are filtered out.

Happy New Year!

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Welcome to 2008! For me, 2007 was a year marked by a tremendous amount of personal and professional growth, and I'm looking forward to continuing that trend in 2008. There's a lot going on right now, and I'm trying to figure out how to best balance work and home life.

The holiday season was a lot of fun. Lots of time with family, taking it easy. Lauren isn't exactly hankering to go mountain biking or hang gliding lately, so I've been spending a lot of time trying to get the house in shape, with my old friend Home Depot. (Really, I should just buy stock...) Over the break, I repainted our downstairs bathroom (twice) and put in a new faucet. It doesn't sound like much, but that bathroom was in really bad shape. The bottom half of the room was painted a deep blue, and the top half white. There was a border right on the white/blue dividing line with a bunch of lighthouses and stuff on it. Would have been perfect for a beach house in Fire Island, but this is a main floor bathroom in a 5-bedroom house in Holtsville.

Since the blue was so deep, it needed two coats of primer after sanding. And then it took three coats of paint. Then Lauren decided she didn't like the color, so I put another three coats of a different color on. Then there was the white trim. Lots of work. (BTW, someone remind me not to use cheap rollers next time. There was a lot of lint that ended up on the wall.)

I also did quite a bit of work around the garage - a couple new shelving units and some shuffling of boxes and stuff, so we could put all the Christmas decorations back and accommodate some boxes of stuff from the Wading River house. Really, though, there's no substitute for a two-car garage.

I did a once-over on the truck, too. Wash, wax and vacuum after an oil change and changing out the air filter. Anyone know where the fuel filter is on a Dodge 1500 pickup? I wasn't able to locate an inline filter, and someone told me you need to drop the tank to get to it, but I'm not sure that info is from a reliable source.