Daniel Coburn

Today was a really bad snow storm and it took me 4 hours round trip to get to work and come back home since the roads and weather was so bad. On the return trip the roads had been cleared pretty well and had some slush on them, so still dangerous. Everyone’s moving along pretty well, and suddenly this JERK in a big 4×4 pick up truck come whizzing by at an excessive speed and throws 1 – 2 inches on my window, and I mean my WHOLE window. So much crap that my wipers wouldn’t move. I’m going about 40 on the freeway, blind, cannot see a thing. Fortunately I was able to move to the side of the road, still blind, but able to see that I’m not about to side swipe anyone. I end up on the side of the road about 30 feet off of it. I was lucky enough to have seen a pole that informed me I was about 10 feed from a large wall. I get out clean my window and slinked my way through the snow back to the freeway.

So some jerk speeding far more than they should in their 4×4 almost cause me to be in a serious accident, and I would have NO WAY to find out who they were. Sadly my windshield has a horizontal crack that I now need to get replaced. So Thanks JERK! (I feel better now)

The other day I decided I would get my hearing checked. For a couple of reasons. First, I have had a horrible ringing in my ears for many many years. Second, my wife will hear things and look at me and say “Can’t you hear that?” The going joke with her is she’ll look at me now and just say “of course not it’s that one pitch”. Third, sometimes I think I miss things. And finally going along with #2 my wife keeps telling me I’m def.

So I get the test done and sure enough I do have hearing loss. They said it’s nothing to really worry about, I’m not def, but I do have a lose in the higher ranges. Which isn’t surprising since the high pitch that is in my ears all the time is in the higher range. So go figure…. They also said, “You are a candidate for a hearing aid, but I wouldn’t strongly recommend it”. I took that as you could hear better, but you’re not hearing that bad right now to worry, so come back later.

So I’ll wait.

More Ears. That night my daughter had a bad ear ache and we put cotton in it etc. etc. and when we took it out later it looked like it had blood on it. So we went into lets get her checked ASAP mode. My in-laws came over quickly so my wife and I could both go with Gena to the Doctor. We get to an urgent care about 8:00 PM and she gets in pretty quick. The Dr. looks in her ears and says they need to be flushed.

If you have EVER had your ears flushed you know it sucks, feels weird etc. Now imagine your ear already hurts. So my sweet daughter gets the drops to loosen the junk in her ear and sits there for a few minutes. A nurse comes in and proceeds to flush her ear. A LOT of stuff comes out including a really big piece of wax. At this point my daughter is upset, and I mean irately upset. And the nurse says there’s more. She tries again and my daughters had enough of it. I ask to just put more drops in and the nurse finally complied. I figured it’ll loosen what’s in there up. We convince my daughter and talk her up to let the nurse do it again, but that was not going to happen any time soon, she wouldn’t even let them look in her ear. Finally with her on my lap hugging me, a different nurse looked in her ear and said she could see the ear drum, so the Dr. could look again.

Her ear is infected and the drum is bulging. The Dr. said he wouldn’t be surprised if the ear drum didn’t rupture. So we internally freak out as parents until the Dr. said it would actually probably make her feel better and he then explained that it would heal. So we felt relieved. My daughter went home and we let her sleep in our bed last night. Lucky for me, it was just her and I, and she woke up several times just screaming, “Get Away From Me, Get outta here”. She was still asleep yelling at the Dr. and Nurses. Today she also threw up, but we aren’t sure why. But she’s my girl and I’m getting ready to go spoil her.

She’ll recover, she always does, but once again she’s really learning to hate Doctors. I hope she gets over that and later realizes how beneficial they are, vs. how bad.

On my birthday, my wife and I ran off to see the movie Bridge to Terabithia. I had never read the book so my perception of the movie was based on the previews. If you’ve seen the previews, and expect a fanciful movie similar to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, you’ll be disappointed. If you have read the book, you will probably be prepared for what you’ll see.

In short the story is about two young kids and the trials they face in life and how through their friendship and imagination they create a wonderful world called Terabithia. They are the King and Queen and we see their friendship grow to something truly meaningful. As all of us grow up we have those friends that we are inseparable from. They are the folks that help mold who we are, for better or worse. This movie has it’s tragedy which I didn’t feel was portrayed in such a way that made it as wrenching as it should have been.

The tragedy does lead me to believe it would not be a movie I’d take my daughter too, but it makes me think that I want to read the book and then possibly read it to her. I cannot give this movie really high marks because the marketing was very misleading, but I can give it a recommendation to those that want a good story and a reminder of your youth.

So I’m categorizing this under “Religion”, why? Because I don’t have a political category yet. This might also end up being a rant, but lets see how this goes.

So Mitt Romney decides to run for president. I don’t know Mitt, I’ve never voted for him, until recently I didn’t know much about him. I first started hearing his name a couple of years ago about MA allowing Same-Sex marriages. I then hear he’s LDS, which is a good thing to me. Now George W. Bush is our current president and he’s a religious man, God fearing man, etc. So that makes me happy as well. Honestly it’s nice to have a president that doesn’t shy away from his beliefs so my hat’s off to GWB. And you should as well even if you don’t like his policy, too many people are too worried about the polls [read Hilary].

What got me the past few days are all the headlines “Mormon, Mitt Romney…” “Mormon enters…” When is the LAST time you saw “Southern Baptist …” “Catholic …”. What does it matter, what matters is their convictions, core beliefs. I guess it just frustrates me that society is so messed up sometimes. I wish Mitt the best of luck, and if his platform is good, then he’ll have my vote.

Some one may find my blog and find something useful in the post. I tried to hook up my Nintendo Wii and kept getting a 52030 error. Now you search on the web and everyone says the same thing.

Upgrade your firmware
Set it to Channel 1 or 11
if already on 1 or 11 change it to the other
You should be fine

Well that didn’t work.

What I ended up doing to finally get it to work is all of the above then I switched from WEP to WPA2 (AES). And sure enough it work. Hope this helps someone else.

At work we’ve deployed a technology called click to call. The company we are using is LivePerson, and they have a really nice all around solution, it has the click to call features, full blown chat, co-browsing and the ability to pick customers that exhibit certain behaviors to approach for a call or chat. You know how you’ll be on a site and a on screen message will pop-in asking if you want to chat with an agent? It’s that sorta stuff.

How successful is the technology? Right now it’s performing ok, it could be a LOT better, but it could be much worse. I think it needs more time in our deployment to really get it settled and work out some of the “issues”. I believe our biggest issue is with our customers. Not that your stupid or anything, but it’s a new technology, and also how do you convey in a small button “If you click this button your phone number will be called immediately and our call center will be called at the same time to connect the two of you.” That would be a rather LARGE button. So we’re going to be working on some a/b testing to see if we can convey the message better. One thing we have done is placed a tool tip box over the button, but the issue is it take a second to appear so by that time the mouse has moved or the customer has moved on.

Also another issue, the phone needs to be near you! If you’re at work, put in your work number to be called (just in case anyone’s reading this)

It’s a great technology to help getting customers on the phone and our business is centered around that happening.

For my 20th birthday (or a anniversary of it) my wife got me a Nintendo Wii. Yes I want it for me, and I also wanted it for my kids. And you know what? I’m really glad I have it. My kids stand up and move vs. sitting in front of the TV or Computer. The first day I had it my daughter turned to me and said, “Daddy can you wipe off my forehead? I’m all sweaty”. So that’s good. What are the benfits of the Wii? It’s the first true next generation system I’ve seen since the Nintendo came out. Yeah sure the PS2, XBox, 360 and PS3 have all taken huge steps in graphics and performance, but the Wii takes huge steps in playability. The games for the PS3 are no different (yet) than those on the 360 or PS2. While the Wii has no real comparison. Heck I haven’t even played anything other than a handful of games, the 5 sports games that came with it, and Zelda.

“So what you swing a controller at the screen, it’s not even HD!?!” … You’re right, good news neither is my TV. If I were going to go out and buy an HD TV, HD DVD or Blue Ray then I’d get a PS3 since it’s cheaper than a Blue Ray player, but I’m not so I won’t. Nintendo has truly made me reconsider them as the top of the industry. They fell behind with their Game Cube and N64, but came out of the gate’s swinging with the Wii. I’ve only had issues getting the wireless hooked up and working. (AND YES I SWITCHED to Channel 11 or 1, so if you have a solutions other than that one, post it ).

With seeing the Wii bringing you more into the game what is it going to be like in 10 years? With new technology being introduced daily, I can only imagine. Intel showed off an 80 Core Processor today, so now think of having all of your movement tracked. Turning and facing a monster, wearing an interactive head set vs. hooking up to a TV.. the possibilities are endless.

I haven’t written a lot about my new job, since I’ve been busy with the ski season etc. But I thought it would be an appropriate time to write once and a while about it.

I wanted to talk about PPC(Pay Per Click) and Click Fraud. I work with Yahoo and Google to pay for ads and I have a substantial amount that I spend on it. So fraud is a big concern. Now my amount compared to some is small, but when you do the math some of the numbers can be astronomical.

Let’s look at some figures. Click Forensics says that click fraud for Q4 was 14.2%, and Shuman from Google believes it is high Shumans Blog. Let’s say Shuman is right and the number is high, lets half it. So 7.1% Click Fraud… If you advertise and spend only $100k that’s still $7100 in fraud. My opinion is that too much, and I’m sure everyone would agree. I do believe search engines are doing a better job finding and correcting bad clicks, but I would say they are more in the realm of 1 – 2% vs. 7.1%, so that still $5-6k someone’s losing. Now if Click Forensics is right then the numbers balloon up.

“But Google credits you”… They sure do but they don’t tell you what clicks were credited etc. I don’t blame them, but still I don’t know if they simply look at my $.10 clicks and write them off and keep the fraudulent $5.00 clicks… I just don’t know, and THAT is the problem. I do not trust them since they police themselves.

Looking at raw data from Click Forensics on my companies logs, I’m seeing a HUGE potential for click fraud. For Google alone on a single account I’ve seen several thousands of $ in possible exposure, so even getting a portion of that will add up to big returns.

What can people do to reduce their exposure to fraud?
1. Don’t advertise on content networks, they’ll kill you ever time (yes I know I have adsense on my blog )
a. if you choose too, watch your terms that get high clicks and think of removing them
b. look at your logs and look for possible places of high clicks that do not have a lot of page views.
2. Watch your high bids and strip them from your campaign.
3. If you don’t want to remove the high bid terms, reduce the amount you want to spend.
4. Look into click forensics; they have a free product that people can use, if you spend a lot give them a call.

That’s it for now. Feel free to comment on it, I’d love to hear from others.

Daniel