I just counted, I have 4 computers in my house running at all times, each probably sucking as much power as a couple of light bulbs. Two are the desktop machines used by the humans in the household at random times during the day. One is a low-power mini-ITX machine working as a file-server and the other is hooked to the TV in the livingroom where it is occasionally used to watch downloaded video.

I’d shut the desktops down at night, but they backup to one another. The fileserver has software mirrored drives, but I like having multiple copies of things on multiple machines. The TV computer could probably be replaced with some sort of networked video player with faster startup and lower power consumption, but my encryped 802.11g network may be a little too flakey to be used to reliably play back high-quality video stored on another system.

I think I need to rethink my approach to backup and storage first, and then go from there. I want to be turning at least two of these things off every night.

I’ve just learned about an exciting new business and I have to say: Superstraunt is going to be huge. It’s in stealth-mode now, but within two years, all the kids will be talking about it.

That’s right, you read it here first.

I can’t say more, yet.

Tookie Williams has, hopefully, made his last stop before execution.

Under other circumstances an amoral sociopath with leadership skills like Williams could become Vice President, Speaker of the House or even Commander in Chief. It’s a shame, of course, that Cheney, De Lay, and Bush may never pay the ultimate price for their crimes, but that’s no reason to spare Tookie Williams for the murders he committed, and all the more blood that will be spilled as part of his legacy as founder of the Crips.

No hollow deathbed confession can wash the blood from his hands or the evil from his stained soul. Good riddance, asshole.

“WinDirStat is a open source disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows”:http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/.

It scans your disk and then shows you what folders and files are taking up the most space on your hard disk, producing both an expandable list of the directories on your hard disk, sorted by size, and a visualization, color-coded according to file type.

It takes a few minutes to gather all the information, but once its done, you can see at a glance what’s using the most space on your hard disk.

It’s quickly become fashionable to speculate that another Internet bubble is quickly inflating. Yahoo’s recent purchase of del.ico.us for $30M just 8 months after VC’s invested ~$1M into what was, to that point, a one man operation, has only thrown gas on the fire. (That’s $100/user for each of about 300K users)

Based on what I saw today when I checked out WordPress.org, I’m inclined to agree. I was looking for info on the beta of WordPress 2.0, what got my attention was a link at the bottom of the page inviting people to advertise on WordPress.org. Clicking on the link took me to a page on Adbrite.com with this information:

$100K for a weeks sponsorship? Estimated clickthroughs: 590. Cost per click $196!

If I’m parsing the other stats they give properly, wordpress.org gets about 17K page views a day. Let’s call round that up to 100K/week. That’s $1 a page view!

Maybe I’m just ignorant in reading these numbers. Maybe there is a hidden thousands multiple somewhere that I’m missing?

Assuming I’m right though, those numbers strike me as nuts. What are your aveage wordpress.org visitors likely to buy that is worth $196/click, especially if you consider that an advertiser would be lucky if 10% of clickthroughs converted to a purchase. Optimistically, that’s an acquisition cost of $1960/customer. More realistically, its probably $19,600/customer. How many products and services have margins to support that?

Even if we assume that the Adbrite numbers are inflated by 50% to make people feel like they get a deal when their hard negotiation cuts the price in half, its still completely bubbiliciously nuts.