Sobering Wednesday

A transaction on your Balance Financial Prepaid MasterCard account for $5.00 at UNIQUE GROCERY STORE NEW ORLEANS LA has been approved. The current available balance on your card account is $4.23.

The above was waitng for me in my e-mail box, as a gruesome reminder of the past evening.
Tuesday night was a farce.
I ran into David the water jug player, and wound up drinking and jamming with him and only making a dollar but letting him talk me into hitting up my debit card for the above purchase of a pint of vodka.
Then, he started bumming cigarettes, though he had never smoked them before.
Then, he wanted me to give him what was left of the pint of vodka as I was leaving.
It is almost time to stop drinking, once again. Drunk and broke is no way to go through life.
Answering Comments:
"A big problem with your page lately is, when someone goes to it, a huge ad loads that opens a 2nd browser window and covers the whole page.

They'd better be paying you plenty!"
The Ad
Yes, I have noticed myself that a second window automatically opens, at times, when I go to my own blog.
I have gotten it to stop doing so by disabling Adobe Flash (by clicking on the square shaped icon to the immediate left of "https:" in the address box on the main page, and then clicking on "disable.")
I believe this setting will be remembered by individual computers and the annoying second window won't pop up at the next visit.
Blog Not Flash Intensive
In my blog posts I have "included" Adobe Flash code only when I've posted a link to a video which is hosted on Youtube.
Youtube A Trojan Horse?
I believe Youtube tries to load Adobe Flash along with the video content; so that the video can have all the latest bells and whistles. Or, so they will be able to bombard the viewer with ads popping up which require Flash to run on. I think all the ultra modern ads take advantage of its functionality. Perhaps the ones which load themselves automatically and then start themselves, complete with audio (so that you have to mute your speakers, if you are in the library) run on it...

Disabling it will only cause the Youtube video frames to contain a dialogue box, telling you that Flash is "required to view this content" and asking you if you want to enable it.
If you want to watch the one stupid video of me practicing in a noisy locale, then, by all means enable Flash. But remember to disable it before leaving the blog, or you will be redirected to an ad the next time you visit...

I always get  an ad for a course in "self publishing," offering to teach me, for around 30 bucks, the ropes and the ins and outs of getting "that novel" off of ones hard drive, and into the hands of people sitting under umbrellas in lawn chairs at the beach.

Your ad may vary...
 I would be interested in hearing about what kind of ads pop up for different people, for the sake of trying to infer what the associations of the contents are to the person getting the ad.

I have generally ruled out the possibility that the ads are culled from the "search terms" used by an individual, to serf the web with Google.  I would be getting ads for Chinese dating services, and not for self publishing. *wink *wink


Maybe I see the self publishing ad because I am a blog "author."
Maybe I see it because, in my blog profile, I describe myself as a writer.
Maybe it's because in my Google profile, I list "writing" as an interest.
The ad is a pain in the ass; and I don't mean maybe.

This started within the past month.
Somebody might be trying to make money off of blogs in general, if it is happening to everybodys blog; or mine specifically; if I have perhaps exceeded some kind of threshold of hits (80,000?) or number of, and "range" of visitors (40 somewhat regular readers from Turkey to Taiwan; Big Flats, New York to Little Rock, Arkansas ...Orange, Massachusetts to Apple Valley, California...Las Cruces, New Mexico to Corpus Cristi, Texas...)

Your ad may vary...

It is Wednesday afternoon, and I am pondering selling off some of my food card money as, I had to wait 2 weeks for my replacement card to arrive intact and, during that time the money had been piling up so that I now have about 185 dollars with only a half a month left.