Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Facebook, YoVille, AdSense, And 249

It seems like forever since I've made a post here.... I've been playing A LOT of the Facebook games Farmville, YoVille, and Farm Town. Ingenious and intricate games that simulate real life - sort of. I showed Mother how they work, but she didn't quite grasp the concept. She said, "Well, when does the game end?" I told her they don't end.

In the farm games, you plow, plant, harvest, and sell your crops so you can earn money and buy bigger and better stuff for your farm. In YoVille, a 'city-ized' version of the farm games, you bake stuff at the Sweets Factory instead of farming. These cute games are ingenious to me. All the things the developers and writers had to think about when they wrote the programs - it's mind-boggling! In the farm games, you plow, plant, harvest, and sell your crops so you can earn money and buy bigger and better stuff for your farm.  In YoVille, a 'city-ized' version of the farm games, you bake stuff at the Sweets Factory instead of farming.  These cute games are ingenious to me.  All the things the developers and writers had to think about when they wrote the programs - it's mind-boggling!

Also, I found a way to put the Google AdSense ads inside the posts here instead of between posts. The article is here at My Digital Life, Living Digitally and Electronically. It's an effort to make the ads more diverse. I'm not sure what everybody else sees, but I only see ads about trucking. There's more to this blog than just trucking, so I'm exploring ways to make the ads more appealing and interesting.

And you may have already noticed that I changed the big, banner type ads to simple links. I think they look more like blog content instead of big banner ads. Grin The experts say doing this will increase the number of clicks, or click through rate (CTR) in AdSense jargon. There are other ways to enhance the CTR too. When I have the time, and my brain is in a learning mode, I'm going to check them out.

In other news: We have yet to recover from the sink hole move, and I'm anxious to improve the looks of our house. Someone is coming out at noon today to give me an estimate on putting the shed over the trailer. They've seen this picture, and know what I want to accomplish:
This is what I want the house to eventually look like

And yesterday I had to call AT&T to get help connecting to the internet. Angry Several months ago Bellouth (AT&T) changed their email platform to Yahoo email. You had to log into Bellsouth first, then be redirected to a new AT&T page, and log in again. It's complicated and frustrating, and I get the feeling AT&T can't even figure out what they've done.

Anyway, I was trying to delete Mother's old Bellsouth.net email address. In the process, I changed the password to the email account - or did I? I still don't know, because I never got to the email stuff. The next time I tried to get on the internet, I kept getting the message that I'd changed the password to the modem! I couldn't connect to the internet at all!

I called AT&T and found out how to reset the modem:

Reset Westell Modem

Once you do that, and reopen the browser on your computer, you have to log into the AT&T INTERNET page (totally different than the phone page), enter a password, and complete a couple of other steps. What an ordeal! But then I remembered there was a time when nobody could access the internet.... I'm sure there was a better way around this external modem fix to use the internet and phone at the same time, but I was on the road when all this happened.

Finally, tomorrow is my appointment with Dr. Misery. From the internet (that I apparently can't live without anymore) I learned where to park - but I'm gonna let the valets do it. Let them remember where my car is....