It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.

The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.

I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.

I was working at about midnight the other night when I heard my little VPN app scream that it'd lost connection.. I noticed that I couldn't get out to my favorite site and checked my DSL modem.... the status light was off. So the next morning I got up and saw it was still off. I called the DSL provider, we went through the standard power off/on stuff and the regular checklist and the guy in India said he'd overnight a new modem (it still hasn't gotten here..). A little while later I remembered something from my CCNA 1 class - check "layer 1" first.

So I swapped out the line between the modem and the wall jack. The lights came back on. I took that phone line and tested it with a phone and it was bad... heh. Always check layer 1 first.

So a while back I looked at payperpost.com and came away thinking it was a nice idea if you had the time to work on your blog every day. The thing I didn't like was their requirement for a continuous stream of posts since the inception of the blog (no gaps of more than 30 days). Bah! I'm like most other Flash developers - way too busy to be posting with any consistency. Some weeks I post every day, some months I don't post at all. But I did like the fact that the rate of payment varies depending on the topic and what is required. Basically the blogger goes through listings of ads and pick the one that pays the best and is interesting to them and writes about it. The blogger picks what to write about rather than the advertiser picking which blog they want to advertise on.

Now.. there's a new alternative in reviewme.com from the same folks that created text-link-ads.com..
Here's what I like about it after checking into it..
- They pay a fixed rate for each post (and it's a fairly decent amount.. very cool..)
- It's easy to get in and get started.. everything is clear..
- They pay via paypal (more play money for spending online without guilt! w00t!)

What I don't like...
- They set the pay rate according to Alexa rank and Technorati rank. They do know how easy it is to game those, right?

(oh.. btw.. I got paid to write this.. cool.... )

Firefox 2 has been released to developers with lots of fixes and new features. Here's a side effect I didn't expect:



I saw that for about 25 minutes last night and at first thought it was a total outage. I tried hitting google from my laptop (totally different network) and it was fine from there. So I tried on my desktop using Internet Explorer and it displayed just fine. If I put "http://google.com" in firefox it redirected to the URL you see in the image. (so I was trying the same URL in both IE and FF). Very odd. It cleared up eventually, and I haven't seen the error since, but it was kind of unsettling to see a server error coming from Google. I expect an error every once in a while from small sites, but Google? It was a bit like hearing the pilot come on the intercom and say "um.. both our engines just shut off but we'll get 'em going again in a minute".

I'm assuming the error was related to my upgrading to the Firefox 2 (RC 3).. maybe just coincidence though.

Anyway, one of the coolest features is spellchecking within HTML form fields. I poked around in the docs and didn't see a way to call it from Flash. Ah well.