Maj, Amita June and I took a ride up to San Francisco to see our friends Jack and Tricia in China Basin. Jack started wikiHow, and we've become friends over the last year or so as we're both learning about growing big wikis bigger. We had good lunch from Specialties and talked about their recent trip to Oahu.
Then we raced back to Mountain View in time to have dinner at Chevys with my brother Andy, sister-in-law Pam, their two daughters, my parents and Pam's mother Midge. A big party, but we managed to get along, even with 3 girls under 4 years old around. Maj had a cranberry margarita bigger than her head, and Amita June ate her complimentary ice-cream cone all by herself.
tags: jack herrick tricia herrick wikihow specialties oahu
I support advertising on Wikipedia
Mike Linksvayer has a great follow-up on my discussion in Journal/11 Nivôse CCXV about advertising in Wikipedia. He notes quite astutely that a $100M/year budget, based on Web advertising, would put the Wikimedia Foundation ahead of almost any other non-profit organization in the world. $100M is a mind-boggling sum of money to leave uncollected.
Think that number's gotta be off by a couple of digits? Mike points out that "In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M." Could Wikipedia get something on the same order of magnitude? Almost certainly.
Among other things, he suggests that contributors to the current Wikimedia fundraising drive add a simple comment to their donations: "I support advertising on Wikipedia."
Great idea!
tags: wikipedia advertising mike linksvayer
l33t
So, I got a notice from Aeroplan, Air Canada's frequent-flier-miles program, that with all the travel I'd done in 2006, I'd almost be eligible for their Elite benefits level. I'd done 24,341 miles of travel last year -- mostly with trips to California, Portland and Copenhagen -- and the elite threshold was 25K.
Today I was reviewing my 2006 flying record and realized that I wasn't credited for one leg of one flight to the West Coast, so I called up and got the miles. Starting in March, I'm gonna be in the the l33t crowd at Aeroplan. Rad!
tags: aeroplan air canada l33t